Every morning, rain or shine, Bob Russell, resident of Castle Valley, checks his rain gauge and reports the data to a website called the CoCoRaHS—the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network. Russell’s data reporting is part of a larger effort to collect regional weather data led by John Kyle, a data acquisition program manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service (NWS) in Grand Junction.
You could be the next data collector: Kyle is looking for volunteers like Russell, but who live in Moab, to take on the daily tasks of collecting rain, temperature, and snow data.
Specifically, Kyle is looking for an official observer to take over for the previous observer—that person volunteered for 27 years, and is now retiring from the service. The new volunteer will need to use official, manual equipment that Kyle will help install at the volunteer’s property.
“It’s not automation. It is a manual rain gauge, a standard that has been set for this equipment going back a few hundred years,” Kyle said.
The rain gauge and snow board are used to track surface measurements of rain, snow, and hail amounts. The data will be used for climatological and archival records, to record changes year to year, and help provide a record of the changes from place to place.
Remarkably, there’s a wide range of differences in weather in one seemingly similar geographic area. Through his efforts, Russell has observed unique microclimates even across Castle Valley, with locations varying by temperature and rainfall.
Grand County High School Earth Science teacher Mary Walker-Irvin has also experienced this—her own personal home temperature data collections near the wetlands will vary up to 15 degrees compared to the data she collects at the high school. She collects data, and teaches weather data collection to her students, because Moab is a “data desert,” she said: the closest regional National Weather Service station offices are in Grand Junction, Salt Lake, Flagstaff, and Cedar City.
Walker-Irvin brings her passion and expertise—she was a military meteorologist for 22 years—to the 9th graders she teaches at GCHS. The class starts simply: every day, they’ll watch the clouds and compare what they see to temperature and weather conditions. Through this process of relating weather variables, students gain an awareness and appreciation of the local environment, Walker-Irvin said.
Walker-Irvin seized the opportunity to include her students in data collection when she was granted a “Weather Bug,” an automated monitoring device from the National Weather Service, with grant funding from the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Association and KUTV in spring 2016. Currently, a miscommunication between the school network computers and the device have led to it being not operational.
Daily observations, like what Walker-Irvin does with her class, and Russell does with his rain gauge on his property in Castle Valley, can help build a more complete picture of the weather each day. Modern weather reporting is a massive effort, utilizing data collected with Doppler radar, satellites, and weather balloons—according to the National Weather Service, weather balloons are released twice a day at 92 sites across the United States. Those balloons collect data like wind speed, temperature, pressure, and precipitation: According to Kyle, the data is sent to a supercomputer in Maryland that computes around four quadrillion calculations per second.
More data can create more accurate weather models, which are used to predict weather in the future—the models are only as good as the data imported. According to Windy, a popular weather app, there are five major global weather models and ten major local and regional weather models.
The CoCoRaHS, the program Russell submits his data to, was created by climatologist Nolan Doesken following a massive flood in Fort Collins, CO in July 1997 that killed five people and injured dozens. Concerned citizens with a desire to learn more and come together after the tragedy prompted the creation of the program.
With more data on rain and weather patterns, maybe there could’ve been better predictions of that flood—something Kyle echoed for Moab. During the deluge of rain that caused record flooding in Moab in August 2022, Kyle said more data points of how much and where rain fell during past monsoon seasons could have helped in both predicting and verifying weather models, ultimately helping to protect residents and infrastructure.
Today, the CoCoRaHS collects data from over 26,000 active observers in the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, and Guam. It’s recognized by the National Weather Service as an accurate source of data and official record.
Get involved
If all this talk of weather excites you, you could be the next official weather volunteer. Kyle is making a push to recruit more people to the CoCoRaHS network this season. He’ll come to your house and make sure you are set up to record and start the journey of paying attention to daily fluctuations. The site is important—there must be an open field to place the rain gauge so it’s not disturbed by trees.
In Castle Valley, Russell says the daily task of checking the rain gauge is gratifying. “I like to be able to contribute something,” he said. “The weather service is great, the analysis and information—both scary and good—is important.”
Russell declared himself a homebody, making it convenient for him to collect the data everyday—he noted that a world traveler might not do well with the mission.
“It requires some dedication,” he said. “It’s something you want to do.”
If you’d like to participate in the process of collecting weather data for the area, contact John Kyle at john.kyle@noaa.gov or sign up with the CoCoRaHS network at https://www.cocorahs.org/.
“I want to help Moab realize these essential elements of a healthy, livable community so that we may continue to shift more fully towards economic growth and diversification, civic engagement, and an increased investment in building lives and families in our desert community,” Topper said.
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