Citizen Science Program needs your help observing the weather!

Do you ever wonder how much rainfall you received from a recent thunderstorm?  If so, an important volunteer weather-observing program needs your help!  The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow network, or CoCoRaHS, is looking for new volunteers across Florida.  The grassroots effort is part of a growing national network of home-based and amateur observers that has the goal of providing a high-density precipitation network that supplements existing observations.

CoCoRaHS came about as a result of a devastating flash flood that hit Fort Collins, Colorado, in July 1997, which showed the need for more local-scale precipitation observing.  In the years after, the network expanded, arriving in Florida in 2007.  Through CoCoRaHS, thousands of volunteers, young and old, document the size, intensity, duration and patterns of rain, hail, and snow by taking simple measurements in their own backyards.  CoCoRaHS observations proved essential for documenting Hurricane Michael rainfall in 2018.  

To join the network, volunteers sign up on the CoCoRaHS Web site,  http://www.cocorahs.org.  On the Web site, they also can purchase the required inexpensive 4-inch plastic rain gauge and take a simple training module.  They also use the Web site to submit their reports.  Observations are immediately available on maps and reports viewable by anyone with an Internet connection.  The process takes only five minutes a day, providing accurate measurements that supplement existing networks and provide useful results to scientists, resource managers, decision makers, and other users.

“Florida has extremely variable rainfall over short distances, especially during the summer wet season”, said Danny Brouillette, a climatologist with the Florida Climate Center (a unit of Florida State University) and a Florida coordinator for CoCoRaHS.  “Data gathered from CoCoRaHS volunteers are very important in better understanding local weather and climate patterns.”

“We are in need of new observers across the entire state.  We would like to emphasize rural locations and areas near the coast,” added Brouillette.

Brouillette can be reached by e-mail at dbrouillette@coaps.fsu.edu or telephone at 850-644-0719. 

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