“I was just fascinated by the CoCoRaHS program,” says Ketzel Levens, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) collects precipitation data through volunteer reporting. Levens’s journey with the program began out of sheer interest. “I was looking at the data every single day.” In time, Levens got involved with recruitment for volunteers and eventually became the local coordinator for the program.
Being involved as a volunteer means checking a well-calibrated rain gauge and turning in daily reports. “The funniest thing about all of this is that we have automated stations across the area,” says Levens. “At the end of the day, one of the most precise values that we can still get is from a manually read gauge.”
For those interested in becoming a volunteer with the CoCoRaHS Network, more information can be found on their website at cocorahs.org
