Abstract:

CoCoRaHS, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (www.cocorahs.org), celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2023. What started out as a small Citizen Science effort along Colorado's Front Range now provides daily rainfall observations from over 26,000 volunteer observer's locations in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and the Bahamas.  Each morning Citizen Scientists measure how much precipitation fell at their location during the previous 24 hours using a simple manual rain gauge and report it to the CoCoRaHS website for the world to see.  An interactive mapping system lights up with an average of 16,000 observations daily.  The data is used by many entities from the National Weather Service to local emergency managers and has become a vital part of many of their products. 

This presentation will give a brief history of the program (Pennsylvania joined the network in 2005), show how the data is gathered, who uses the data, the website's features as well as the other facets of the programs such as condition monitoring, ET observations, educational components, etc. just to name a few. We will also take a brief look at how the program is doing across the Keystone and how you can get involved.