Volunteers Needed for Nationwide Weather Project

With the wild shifts in temperature from week to week, weather is on everyone’s minds.

Weather scientists are looking for your help.

We all know to check out the window to see if it’s raining.

But with a map published online by the researchers at the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and snow, or CoCoRaHS Network, in a way, you’re checking outside 15,000 windows across the U.S all in real time.

“The benefits are tremendous,” said Dr. Adnan Akyuz, a state climatologist with North Dakota.  “The scientists, the researchers, we’re all interested. We need data. Data data data.”

Louise Tegtmeier’s been collecting rain and snow with tools like these near Grandin for almost a decade.

She’s part of 300-some other volunteers statewide.

“It takes about 3 minutes a day,” she said, “this year, I didn’t get my snow board down before it started to snow.”

It’s important to get as many volunteers as possible, because each set of data collection points improves predictions. That’s because measurements can be different depending on whether you’re here. Or here, or here, or here.

“We always thought that rainfall here is different than across the street. Farmers thought, my rainfall is different than my neighbors’ farm,” said Dr. Akyuz.

And since scientists and satellites can’t be everywhere at once, you never know if your window on the world will be the one needed most.

“Hillsboro once lost all these trees in a storm, and then there we were, we didn’t have hardly anything,” said Louise.

We had a big surge of volunteers here right after the flood of 2009 and that really improved our ability to predict the crest in the subsequent floods, weather experts say.

Plus, we’re tied with Delaware this year for the state record for most volunteers per capita.

For more information on how to volunteer, click here.