The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, or CoCoRaHS, is a network of volunteer weather observers in the United States, Canada, and the Bahamas that take daily readings of precipitation and report them to a central data store over the Internet. The program is an example of citizen science.
In 1997, the network was started in Larimer County, Colorado, after a flash flood in Spring Creek killed five people[1] and damaged structures in the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, including hundreds of millions of US dollars in damage to the Colorado State University campus.[2]
The severity of the flood and its widespread spatial variability surprised meteorologists, and Nolan Doesken, a former assistant state climatologist for the state of Colorado, asked for precipitation measurements from private citizens in the area. About 300 responded to his emergency request for data. Said Doesken later:
The program was originally confined to Colorado (the first "Co" in "CoCoRaHS" stood for "Colorado" instead of "Community"), but began expanding to other states, first expanding to Wyoming in 2003, with the last expansion into Nebraska in March 2013.[3]
| 1 | Colorado | 1998 | |
| 2 | Wyoming | 2003 | |
| 3 | Kansas | 2004 | |
| 4 | New Mexico | March 2005 | |
| 5 | Texas | April 2005 | |
| 6 | Maryland | October 2005 | |
| 7 | Virginia | October 2005 | |
| 8 | District of Columbia | October 2005 | |
| 9 | Pennsylvania | October 2005 | |
| 10 | Indiana | December 2005 | |
| 11 | Missouri | March 2006 | |
| 12 | Oklahoma | June 2006 | |
| 13 | Montana | December 2006 | |
| 14 | Illinois | December 2006 | |
| 15 | Alaska | December 2006 | |
| 16 | Nevada | March 2007 | |
| 17 | Wisconsin | March 2007 | |
| 18 | Tennessee | April 2007 | |
| 19 | South Dakota | June 2007 | |
| 20 | Iowa | August 2007 | |
| 21 | North Carolina | September 2007 | |
| 22 | New York | September 2007 | |
| 23 | Florida | October 2007 | |
| 24 | Alabama | November 2007 | |
| 25 | Kentucky | November 2007 | |
| 26 | Oregon | Late 2007, Early 2008 | |
| 27 | Louisiana | January 2008 | |
| 28 | New Jersey | February 2008 | |
| 29 | South Carolina | March 2008 | |
| 30 | Rhode Island | April 2008 | |
| 31 | Georgia | May 2008 | |
| 32 | Washington | June 2008 | |
| 33 | Utah | July 2008 | |
| 34 | Michigan | July 2008 | |
| 35 | Mississippi | August 2008 | |
| 36 | California | October 2008 | |
| 37 | North Dakota | November 2008 | |
| 38 | Idaho | January 2009 | |
| 39 | Ohio | February 2009 | |
| 40 | Massachusetts | March 2009 | |
| 41 | Vermont | April 2009 | |
| 42 | Arkansas | April 2009 | |
| 43 | West Virginia | May 2009 | |
| 44 | Hawaii | June 2009 | |
| 45 | Connecticut | July 2009 | |
| 46 | New Hampshire | July 2009 | |
| 47 | Maine | August 2009 | |
| 48 | Arizona | September 2009 | |
| 49 | Delaware | September 2009 | |
| 50 | Minnesota | December 2009 | |
| 51 | Nebraska | March 2009 |
| 1 | Canada | December 2012 | |
| 2 | Puerto Rico | June 2013 | |
| 3 | U.S. Virgin Islands | February 2015 | |
| 4 | The Bahamas | June 2016 | |
| 5 | Guam | October 2022 |
CoCoRaHS is used by a wide variety of organizations and individuals. The National Weather Service (NWS), other meteorologists, hydrologists, emergency managers, city utilities (water supply, water conservation, storm water), transportation departments, insurance adjusters, the USDA, engineers, mosquito control, ranchers and farmers, outdoor and recreation interests, teachers, students, and neighbors in the community are examples of people who use CoCoRaHS data.[4]
In or around 2000, the National Weather Service Lincoln, Illinois independently began a similar program, the Significant Weather Observing Program (SWOP). CoCoRaHS data supplements the more rigorous data from the national program with increased spatial and temporal resolution. Real-time data is also provided by the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP), whose users operate weather stations that automatically report over the Internet, and which supplements the more rigorous data reported by formal surface weather observation stations. The earliest and thus critically important for its long-term historical record from respective locations is the Cooperative Observer program of manually recorded daily summaries.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are major sponsors of CoCoRaHS and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is also a partner.[4] Other organizations have contributed either financially or with supplies and equipment. Many other organizations and individuals have also pitched in time and resources to help keep the network up and running.
As of 2015, all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico participate in CoCoRaHS.[5]
In December 2011, the CoCoRaHS Canada network began in Manitoba following a massive flood in that province.[6]
As of 2014, the network had expanded to the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and Saskatchewan,[6] with over 20,000 participants as of March 2015.[4]