For those of you in the United States, Canada, or the Bahamas, may I recommend:
CoCoRaHS - the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network
CoCoRaHS is, as the name implies, a community volunteer effort to measure rain, hail, and snow amounts across the member nations. It's also fun as hell.
I'm probably the exact target audience for a project like CoCoRaHS. I LOVE WEATHER SO MUCH. I am obsessed with it. I love rain. I love hail. I love snow. I love slight changes in wind. I am at best ambivalent toward rapid changes in barometric pressure, which remind me I have metal in my bones (when they go up) and moderate to severe osteoarthritis (when they go down). I'm the idiot who will happily stand outdoors in a rainstorm. I LOVE WEATHER.
I also love KNOWING THINGS, with DATA, except I don't actually like ANALYZING DATA because it requires basic math skills and attention to detail that I don't really possess. But break it down small enough and I'm IN. "Read this rain gauge and tell us what it says every day" is a thing I can do.
CoCoRaHS does require participants to have a standardized rain gauge, so that readings can actually be compared across locations. You do have to spend your own money on said rain gauge (or talk a friend into gifting you one).
Turns out I am fine with this. THIS IS THE BEST RAIN GAUGE I HAVE EVER OWNED. I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Even if I hadn't signed up for CoCoRaHS, I would consider this rain gauge the best $47 I have spent this year. It's so easy to use and accurate to the 0.0x inch. Plus mine is mounted about four and a half feet in the air, so it doesn't get dirt in it like the ground-stake ones do.
Every morning as I leave for work (7:00 am), I read the rain gauge. I then enter its reading on the CoCoRaHS website. There is an interactive map that populates with each participant's data:
I'm in the Eastern time zone in the US, so when I put my data in, there's nearly nothing on the map past the Great Lakes and nothing at all beyond the Mississippi. Watching the map populate over the course of the morning is also fun. I don't know why. It is, though.
It's fascinating how granular CoCoRaHS data can get. For instance, yesterday my area got some rain. Thanks to the gauges near me, I could see EXACTLY where our area got 0.01 inches more or less than my gauge got. There's a nearby town with two gauges practically on top of one another - one is at a local school and one is at a home about three houses down the street. They reported 0.01 inch differences in precipitation!
CoCoRaHS was started after a Colorado storm that featured torrential downpours...in places that had zero official rain gauges. All the official gauges recorded far less precipitation. This, of course, meant that officials didn't know how bad the storm actually was for the folks who got the worst of it. Emergency services didn't know where to go, and insurance companies were like "National Weather Services says you're fine *shrug emoji* denied."
So CoCoRaHS's founders figured "if we convince people to put rain gauges EVERYWHERE, we will know more about what the rain is doing EVERYWHERE." Simple. And absurdly fun.
Like most gardener/naturalist types, I want to tell EVERYONE ALL THE TIME about what's growing, what's flowering, which critters have shown up in my yard, and so on. And CoCoRaHS wants to hear it!
They also take weekly Condition Reports from volunteers:
Condition Reports estimate the overall wetness/dryness of the area, compared to normal/average for that area. They also allow volunteers to give qualitative descriptions of how vegetation and animals are doing.
...I can send in a paragraph about how full the ollas are once a week and y'all count this as SCIENCE? Hells yeah I'm in.
Added bonus: taking notes for the weekly Condition Report has gotten me back into the habit of observation-based journaling. It's something I haven't done for a very long time. Once I left home and had to cram myself into the concrete confines of urban life, it just got too painful to notice all the scraps of flora and fauna changes that only told me what I was missing in the woods. I missed it so much.
I bought a rain gauge and I'm having more fun than I have in years.
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