National Weather Service Looking for CoCoRaHS Volunteers

DULUTH, Minn. – The National Weather Service is looking for more volunteers to report rain, snow, and hail totals.

March is the annual push for new members to join CoCoRaHS, which stands for the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network.  It’s a program that allows people to measure precipitation from where they live, and supplement measurements recorded by automated devices scattered throughout the area.

“Nothing compares to the invaluable service of an actual human going out, reading a range gauge, telling us what is falling out of the sky in their area,” says Ketzel Levens, meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Duluth.  “That’s invaluable!  The more of that we can get, the better.”

Levens says meteorologists will use this information to help with future forecasts.  “Every area in our forecasting area is just as important as the other, whether it’s a metro area like the Twin Ports or a rural farm land.  If we don’t have the data, we can’t do our best job.  We have a ton of model data, but without actual ground truth we don’t know if that’s correct, and that’s going to inform our forecasting.  The better data that we can get, the better we can see how our models are doing, the better product that we can put out and protect life and property.”

So far this month, Minnesota and Wisconsin have led all states in adding new members with 254 and 66, respectively.  Levens says the greatest need for their service area are locations that are on the outskirts of their radar range.  That means Koochiching, Itasca, and Cass counties to the west, and Ashland and Sawyer counties to the east, as well as along the South Shore east of Superior.

More information about CoCoRaHS, how to sign up, and free training can be found online.  Levens says the only equipment one needs to buy is a proper rain gauge, which costs under $50.