CoCoRaHS - Join the Rain Gauge Brigade

"Storm" copyright by and courtesy of Mike Hardiman, NOAA

If you have an interest in rain and drought -- and the effects they have on our environment here in the Borderland, then CoCoRaHS is for you!  CoCoRaHS is the Community Collaborative Rain Hail and Snow network, essentially a network of volunteer precipitation observers.  Armed with standardized 4" diameter rain gauges, these volunteers take daily measurements of precipitation in their own backyards, and share their data via the internet.  The data is then used by meteorologists and hydrologists to assess Flash Flooding potential, initialize river forecast models, and map out and study regional rainfall patterns.  During dry weather, even "zero precipitation reports" are useful for assessing the areal extent of drought and its impacts. To join, all you need is daily access to the internet, and a standardized rain gauge.  The gauges can be purchased for about $28 through the cocorahs.org website.  Occasionally, the regional coordinator has a few gauges to give away to serious observers.  CoCoRaHS is volunteer-friendly -- if you're out-of-town, you can send in multi-day accumulation reports when you return.  The goal is to create a spatially-dense network of observations so that a few missing reports are more tolerable.  

"CoCoRaHS people"

For more information on joining CoCoRaHS, you can visit the El Paso Area CoCoRaHS Page (http://www.srh.noaa.gov/epz/?n=cocorahsEPZ), or the national CoCoRaHS page (http://www.cocorahs.org/).  Or, you can send an email to one of the regional coordinators: Mike Hardiman in West Texas (mike.hardiman@noaa.gov), and Dave DuBois (dwdubois@nmsu.edu) or Alberta  Morgan (mitzisami@yahoo.com) in New Mexico.