Description:

This session is dedicated to topics related to the collection, preparation, analysis, and application of data from the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS). CoCoRaHS is a nearly 25-year-old citizen science project that has become the largest source of real-time daily precipitation observations in the United States. By engaging tens of thousands of volunteer observers across several countries and delivering high-quality precipitation observations to a wide variety of government agencies, public and private organizations, and individuals in a timely manner, CoCoRaHS embodies the meeting theme of “Data: Driving Science. Informing Decisions. Enriching Humanity.”

A session on CoCoRaHS is particularly suitable for the 103rd Annual Meeting of the AMS in Denver given that CoCoRaHS was founded in Colorado and will celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2023. 

The session is being proposed for the 27th Conference on Applied Climatology because CoCoRaHS data are being used for a variety of purposes in applied climatology, and its leaders have been heavily involved in the applied climate community. Since its founding in 1998, CoCoRaHS has grown from a few observers in northeastern Colorado to a large observing network that has collected more than 50 million observations across all 50 U.S. states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Canada, and the Bahamas. These data complement other observing networks by enhancing the spatial density of observations and are being used in a broad range of applied climatological applications, including natural resource planning, hydrology, agriculture, outdoor recreation, and the forecasting and analysis of extreme events.

While all abstracts relevant to both the Conference on Applied Climatology and CoCoRaHS are welcome, presentations and posters that fall into one of the following three topic areas are of particular interest:

1. Descriptions of analyses and operational applications that highlight the utility of CoCoRaHS data.
2. Discussions of the recruitment, training and distribution, data management, and outreach techniques and approaches that have led to the continued success of this community science effort.
3. Reflections by and about the people and events that shaped CoCoRaHS, from its founding to the present day.