If you’ve been reading this blog for long enough, you know that March is the month that we go cuckoo for CoCoRaHS! For those who don’t know, the Community Collaborative Rain Hail and Snow network is a group of citizen scientists who collect daily rainfall using an official CoCoRaHS rain gauge and report it on their web site using a computer or a smartphone app. Reports pour in from all over the country plus a few in Canada and the Bahamas, too. National Weather Service meteorologists use the information for flash flood reporting and post-storm analysis, and I’ve used it once or twice in doing forensic meteorology for court cases (if you want to know more about that, you can view a talk I did for CoCoRaHS at https://www.cocorahs.org/Content.aspx?page=wxtalk33). If you are interested in joining, head to their website at https://www.cocorahs.org/ and use their web site to view training videos, purchase a gauge from one of their low-cost vendors, and sign up for your own station. Right now South Carolina is leading the pack of new observers signed up this year, but there is plenty of time before the end of March to join up. You can also email me for more information. If you have ever complained about the lack of rainfall data in your area, here is your chance to fill a hole on the map. Maybe you’ll be as lucky as Becki Odom below, who caught 34 inches in Hurricane Florence in her gauge in just a couple of days.
