ALAMOSA — Heavy rain and hail fell in Alamosa June 17, but without weather spotters and Doppler radar it’s hard to know how much.
Even with the new National Weather Service Doppler Radar coming online this fall, there are already weather spotters in the San Luis Valley that have volunteered to report moisture each day. Both will provide more information about the weather in the Valley.
Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) is a nonprofit community-based network of 8,000 volunteers working together to map precipitation in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Canada, and the Bahamas.
There are a total of 49 volunteers located throughout the San Luis Valley: 13 in Alamosa County, three in Conejos, 13 in Costilla, two in Mineral, 18 in Rio Grande, and 10 in Saguache.
Twenty years ago, volunteers began measuring the moisture for the previous 24 hours and report it to the CoCoRaHS. The data is collected by the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
It started because of a storm in 1997 that dropped more than 13 inches of rain west of Fort Collins, but no one reported the deluge to the National Weather Service so the opportunity for early warning of the flood was missed.
The following year a grant was obtained, and three high school students began designing a was to collect rainfall and recruit volunteers to report the data. Then on June 17, 1998 “the students flipped the switch and turned on the first version of the CoCoRaHS website – and it worked Several dozen reports were successfully submitted and mapped,” according to its website.
The information is used by weather forecasters, hydrologists, water management, researchers, agriculture, climatologists, the insurance industry, engineering, recreation and among others.
CoCoRaHS is always looking for additional volunteers and can sign up at the website www.cocorahs.org