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Fellow CoCoRaHS observers, I am a lead forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Boulder. I want to make you aware of how we use your data, and the value that your real-time reporting has for us. We use your daily reports to verify the accuracy of our forecasts and warnings. Areas that get heavy rain one day are more prone to flooding the next, so your reports also help us know where there is an elevated threat. You can make your reports more valuable by submitting them in real time. The CoCoRaHS "quick hail", "detailed hail", and "intense rain" reports are sent immediately to our office. If they are serious enough, they trigger an alarm at our warning forecaster's workstation. There has been more real time reporting of hail this spring, and this has been quite helpful. We have already had a couple of occasions where a CoCoRaHS report was the only report of severe weather we received. This can happen even in urban areas, because storms can affect only a portion of the city, and because only a fraction of people are both observing the weather and able to report to us immediately. Last year there was a storm over The Pinery subdivision in Douglas county which produced three inch diameter hail and broke the observers hailpad. There were several weather service spotters nearby, but the storm was slow moving and not very large, and the CoCoRaHS observer provided our only report of severe hail. On another occasion last year, we had an equipment failure that left our office without radar data while there were several warnings in effect. A CoCoRaHS report from east of Fort Collins made it clear that another warning was needed as the storm moved near that city, and we quickly had our backup office take over for us and issue the warning. Your reports can help us provide current information to the community and help us make good warning decisions. Our weather radars are much better than they were 20 years ago, and we have excellent information about where storms are, but there is still a lot of uncertainty about details such as hail size and rainfall rate. If you are not able to submit immediate reports or are not comfortable connecting your computer to the electric or phone lines during the storm, your information can still be quite valuable if you submit it right after the storm. This will still give us a benchmark to know what the storm was producing as it passed your location. The National Weather Service is interested in all aspects of CoCoRaHS, from current weather to research on future radar systems, to a basic understanding of precipitation patterns. We appreciate your participation at whatever level you are able to. Chad Gimmestad |
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