What To Do On A Rainy Day

This past fall one of my fellow Master Gardeners, Ann, asked if I wanted to record rainfall.  Well, being the gardener that I am, I said that I already measured rainfall and kept track on the calendar function of my Google account.  She was talking about a volunteer group where you record your rainfall online.  I said, "Sure!".  This organization wants you to use a specific rain gauge, so if I was to join forces with this group I needed to buy said rain gauge.  This organization is CoCoRaHS, Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, & Snow Network.

CoCoRaHS is a  non-profit citizen based organization of folks across the country who keep track of precipitation and report it to their data log page on the CoCoRaHS website.  The only cost in joining is the rain gauge.  You send in your address and tell them where on your property you are going to place the gauge....roughly place it.  You will receive a password and a station number and your location coordinates.  It is important to make sure you are away from structures (house) and trees.  During the winter placing ours in the middle of the yard wouldn't be an issue, but in the summer it would be a bother to remove it every time you needed to move or when the irrigation system came on.

The data that is collected is used by National Weather Service, emergency services organizations, USDA, city utilities, teachers and students, hydrologists, and  many others.  It is nice to be a part of a much bigger volunteer group.   You can read more about it on their site.

We didn't want to have our rain gauge mounted on a 4x4 -- too big, so our idea was to mount a board on a fence stake and attach the rain gauge on that.  Seems to work.  It is important to make sure the gauge is level.  We do have a large area across the street that we could place it, but the reporting time window is between 7 AM and 9 AM.  Hi, my name is Janet and I don't get up that early.  I am lucky to get my rainfall amount by 9 AM, certainly don't want to have to go up to the street in my jammies to read the gauge.   So here it sits, along our driveway...easy to reach and empty.

The rain gauge has a cylinder inside the outer container.  The cylinder is marked with 1/100th of an inch increments.  The inner cylinder holds one inch.  When we have rain like today -- well over an inch-- it overflows into the outer container.  To read the measurement you take the inner cylinder out of the container and read the inner cylinder's water height.  If there is overflow into the outer container OR the water level is above your one inch line, pour it all into the outer container.  Then fill to the one inch measurement into the cylinder, pour it out, repeat until all the water is gone from the outer container.  The large outer container can hold up to eleven inches of rain, hopefully we don't get more than that in one 24 hour period!

After taking the measurement, you log onto your account and go to your data page.    The date is already on the form, you just add the time and the amount of recorded rainfall.   Hit submit data and you are done for the day.

From this form I like to go to the maps to see how varied the rainfall is in my area.  I am in Greenwood county, along the northern border of Greenwood and Laurens counties.

You can see the measurements vary.  It is fun to see just how much it does vary.   You can see the entire country....

When the weather is dry, I am not as pressed to submit a zero amount of rainfall as I am when we do have rain.  Tomorrow I am going to need my rubber boots to go out in the yard, today we have had more rain than we have had all month...

Are you a rainfall data recorder??  Do you want to be?  CoCoRaHS is always looking for more citizens to measure and record the precipitation in their area.   You can see from my map that there are places where more observers are needed.

Bird photo share time--- This is the little Brown-headed Nuthatch who was being so elusive last week.  He stayed on the suet feeder for quite a while for a nice long photo shoot.

He kept staring at me, I went to various windows to try and get a different angle.

Stay tuned and I will report our rain total for today....it is raining really hard, has been for the last couple hours, since it got dark.  Before it got dark I saw the cylinder was full, one inch of rain.  I am guessing a couple inches by the morning.
Just checked and CoCoRaHS has a blog-- http://cocorahs.blogspot.com/2013/01/winter-comes-to-southern-applachians.html  and a Facebook page--http://www.facebook.com/groups/2433443789/?fref=ts


©Copyright 2012 Janet. All rights reserved. Content created by Janet for The Queen of Seaford. words and photos by Janet,The Queen of Seaford.