Community Collaboration Rain, Hail & Snow Network
I've Seen Frogs and I've Seen Rain
The saying that everything is related could be a subtitle for my newsletter, The Everyday Scientist. Look at this 30-second video of a Rain Frog. Since I’ve been studying both rain and frogs lately, I felt excited to see this little amphibian with a name that marries my two recent obsessions. When I feel excited, I tend to tell everybody what I’m jazzed up about, so I shared the Rain Frog video with a half dozen friends. Curiously, everyone came down hard with for/against opinions about this guy.
Take the poll, and tell me your thoughts about South Africa’s tiny Desert Rain Frog.
Rainwoman
My latest community science project could help you vanquish any rainy-day blues you’ve been fighting lately. Called CoCoRaHS, it is one of the best and simplest activities to do if you have an interest in the weather and want to stay close to home. CoCoRaHS is an acronym for the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, which consists of volunteer meteorologists across the world who measure and report precipitation right from their backyards.
CoCoRaHS started in 1998 after a freak flash flood hit Fort Collins, Colorado. The devastating rainfall was so localized that it dropped more than a foot of rain in parts of the town, but other areas not far away were almost dry. Remember the times you’ve seen columns of rain off in the distance, but your yard stays dry? Usually this happens when your tomato plants look like wizened old men listing sideways in the baking heat. The 1997 Fort Collins flood caught many people by surprise, and flood damage was so expensive, that locals created CoCoRaHS to do a better job of mapping the rain and understanding weather patterns. Now, with some 20,000 volunteers, CoCoRaHS has become the largest source of daily rainfall measurements in the US. It is sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Weather Service (NWS).
As soon as I signed up, I ordered CoCoRaHS’s special All-Weather Gauge and watched the one-hour training video to learn how to take rain measurements to the nearest 100th of an inch. I grew up on a Tennessee tobacco farm, and my dad would mount little rain gauges about the size of a hot dog on the fence post. Those simple glass tubes are distant, underfed relatives to the hefty multi-part gauge the CoCoRaHS folks sent me. When I opened the box, I was surprised at the heft of the $32 gauge which is described as a “precise weather instrument” in the enclosed instruction booklet.
“Here’s my new Clydesdale of a rain gauge,” I told Fred, my husband, as we went outside to put up the 14-inch, double-walled, molded-plastic contraption. January has been damp in Georgia, but it was a sunny and dry day last week when we mounted our gauge on a wooden fence in the backyard, and I began my career as a rainwoman.
I tell my friends about my community science projects all the time. CoCoRaHS discussions often take a hard left into squabble territory. My neighbor Rajeena stopped by to chat two days ago, taking a break from her daily power walk. Right away, as soon as I said the name of the project, she seemed irritated. I was telling her about CoCoRaHS, just getting to part where I would name drop the NOAA connection, and she interrupted: “Wait. It’s called cocoa-what?”
“KO-ko-rozz is how you pronounce it. It is an acronym,” I said.
She harrumphed and looked down at her white sneakers to show what she thought of the weird name. Then she moved right on to squabble two, which I admit a lot of people mention when they check out this particular rain gauge. Rajeena studied the skinny inner tube and asked: “Why’s this tall tube labeled one inch? Looks to me like it’s a foot long. Makes no sense.” She rapped the white tip of her French-manicured fingernail hard against the tube near the black hash marks.
“Yes, that is confusing.” I picked up the CoCoRaHS brochure and found the official explanation because Rajeena was in one of her moods today, ready to argue. I wanted to get it exact so I read straight from the pamphlet:
“The wide funnel at the top catches the rain and squeezes the water into the inner tube which is one-tenth the size of the outer tube. By reducing the area that the water falls into, the depth can be stretched out by the same factor of ten. In this way, the total volume of water (area times depth) that falls through the top of the gauge and the total volume in the inner tube are the same. This stretching allows us to read the dept of the water to an accuracy of 0.01”.
Rajeena was finally satisfied, or more likely bored, with my explanations about CoCoRaHS, and she turned back out to face the sidewalk. I reminded myself to abbreviate this whole topic with the next person I talked to about it. “After I submit 100 daily observations,” I said as she hurried away, “my weather station’s data will become part of NOAA climate history. They send you a certificate and everything.”
I’m impressed, even if Rajeena’s not. I doubt I’ll frame that certificate when it comes, but it will for sure go up on the refrigerator for a while.
The Time It Rained Frogs In Serbia
In February, I will turn my attention to FrogWatch USA which will be a sound-based community science project focused on learning why amphibian populations have declined around the world. Scientists report that more than 30 percent of all amphibian species are now considered endangered. As part of FrogWatch, I will be taught to identify frogs by their croaks, and I’ve rounded up a few friends who say they’ll bring some box wine and join me by the neighborhood pond this spring around sundown to listen. Reading about frogs the other day, I ran across this memorable 2005 frog and rain news story from Serbia:
Thousands of tiny frogs rained on a town in northwestern Serbia, Belgrade daily Blic reported on Tuesday. Strong winds brought storm clouds over Odzaci, 120km north-west of Belgrade, on Sunday afternoon, but instead of rain, down came the tiny amphibians, witnesses said. "I saw countless frogs fall from the sky," said Odzaci resident Aleksandar Ciric. The frogs, different from those usually seen in the area, survived the fall and hopped around in search of water. Belgrade climatologist Slavisa Ignjatovic described the phenomenon as "not very unusual". "A wind resembling a tornado can suck in anything light enough from the surface or shallow water. Usually it is just dust, but sometimes also larger objects," Ignjatovic told Blic.
I want to be a frog person and a rain person! Thanks so much for introducing us to such cool science stuff!
I'm dying to see a picture of the frogs raining down from the sky! If there was one in the article, I didn't see it.
How often do you have to send in your rain gauge observations, and do you have to empty it?