Every March, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (known as CoCoRaHS for short) hosts a competition between states to see which state can recruit the most new observers. In the past, they have called this March Madness, but after concerns about the college basketball tournament not looking kindly on that name, they have named the new competition the Precipitation Absurdity 2024 and are looking for new precipitation observers to fill in holes in rainfall coverage across the United States and beyond. I am the State Coordinator for Georgia and so I would love to see more observers, especially in counties where there is not a single observer (see map below). But even if you are a county with plenty of observers or in one of the other states in the Southeast or elsewhere, we would still love to have you!
CoCoRaHS is the best kind of citizen science, where people taking observations in their own backyard have the chance to make a noticeable improvement in our coverage of rainfall. The National Weather Service uses it for verifying their radar estimates and it is also used by the National Drought Monitor authors and others to depict rainfall on a much denser scale than we could get just using official NWS sources. I have used it in the past for legal cases too. You can visit the CoCoRaHS website (https://cocorahs.org/) to sign up, purchase a discounted official rain gauge (we require all observers to have one that measures to 0.01 inches), and watch videos for more information on how to join, how to set up your rain gauge, and how to report by computer or app. If you have questions, you are also free to email me for more information or to set up a phone call.
