Washington County Enterprise-Leader
Keeping Tabs On Precipitation
TWO RESIDENTS VOLUNTEER WITH NATIONAL WEATHER ORGANIZATION
CoCoRaHS is an acronym for Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network. It is a nonprofit, community network of volunteers who are measuring rainfall, snowfall and hail in different parts of the country.
It all began in Fort Collins, Colo., in 1998 when a flash flood hit the city, according to Mike Borengasser, state climatologist with Arkansas Natural Resources Commission.
After the Fort Collins flood the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University started the network, according to CoCoRaHS website.
“When flooding hit, it was discovered there were only 2-inches of rain in one area of town and 14- inches in another area,” Borengasser said. “They found this out because people had rain gauges that measured the rainfall. When they started looking into this, they thought why not start measuring precipitation, put it on the internet and eventually this spread across the nation.”
Borengasser said Arkansas joined the network in 2009. Since that time people across the state have joined the project.
“We’ve gotten more than 800 people in the state to sign up,” Borengasser said. “Northwest Arkansas has the most people signed up with 26 in Washington County and 36 in Benton County. We’re hoping for even more volunteers during CoCoRaHS March Madness recruitment campaign. Arkansas ranked in the top five in new recruits and per capita signups in 2013.
“It’s a community project,” Borengasser said. “Anyone can sign up. It’s fun for people to do — just have a gauge for measuring rain or they can have a pad and measure snow depth or measure hail.”
Borengasser said the information collected by volunteers is used by the National Weather Service, meteorologists, drought monitors, emergency managers, even ranchers and farmers.
“It can help ranchers determine drought conditions and what to do about hay costs,” Borengasser said, giving one example of its use.
The CoCo RaHS website has a map to view reported precipitation. As of March 12, the website showed 6,795 daily reports from across the nation. The network is currently the largest provider of daily precipitation observations in the U.S.
Jessee Cox, superintendent of Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park, is one of the volunteers with CoCoRaHS.
“I’m pretty sure I signed up this time last year during the recruitment month,” Cox said.
Cox said he has enjoyed reporting precipitation to CoCoRaHS.
“We needed to do it anyway,” Cox said. “A lot that goes on here can be affected by the weather, so it’s good for the park to know.”
Cox said he keeps a spread sheet, not only for precipitation but temperature, so he can go back to see what happened a year before.
“Somebody might say it was 100-degrees last year for the Clothesline Fair and I’ll look and say, no, it was 87-degrees with a cool breeze,” Cox said.
The temperature part is done for the park’s knowledge since CoCoRaHS is only for precipitation.
“I think it’s a good program,” Cox said about the national precipitation network. “I just do basics for them. If we don’t get precipitation I’ll just click on the zero but if there’s something unusual I’ll put it in the notes. If we have snow flurries but no accumulation, I’ll put snow flurries in the notes. When the temperatures fell, I put windchill, -5- degrees, because I thought that was unusual or I’ll put fog in the notes.
“You can see on the website chart that people all over the nation are reporting on it,” Cox said. “What’s interesting is we might get 3-inches of rain here [Prairie Grove] but Fayetteville might get only ½ inch.”
Cindy Martin, who lives on west Washington County Road 610, is also a CoCoRaHS volunteer.
“I volunteered in April 2013,” Martin said, adding she was watching the National Weather Service when she noticed a pop-up on CoCoRaHS.
“I thought that sounds cool because I’m always watching the weather anyway, so I ordered a rain gauge and stuck it on a fence post,” Martin said.
Martin said the only time she has had problems with the hard plastic gauge is when freezing rain collected on it before the snowfall, so she couldn’t get an accurate measurement of the snow.
Cox said he had the same problem but that he did measure snowfall that fell near the gauge.
Martin said keeping rain measurements is not only fun but helps her have a more accurate perspective of the weather.
“We can have a thunderstorm come through and when I check the gauge find out we got 1.2-inches of rain when I didn’t know we got that much.”
Martin also enjoys going to the website to see what measurements others in the area get.
“It’s interesting to see how precipitation can vary like Prairie Grove can get rain but I didn’t get any where I live,” she said.
Martin thinks it would be good for students to volunteer for the network. “It would be neat for kids to do — with the systematic checking every day and know they’re data gathering for others. It could be fun for them to look back over how much rain had accumulated.”
CoCoRaHS is a grassroots network of volunteers of all ages and backgrounds working together to measure precipitation, according to its website.
Borengasser said anyone interested in joining the network could go to www. cocorahs.org, click on Join the CoCoRaHS and select United States. The network also operates in Canada.