Simple Climate and Weather Education via CoCoRaHS's “Message of the Day"

CoCoRaHS and its thousands of rain gauge volunteers are providing timely and accurate precipitation measurements and are helping improve climate monitoring across the U.S.

Since education is a major component of the network in addition to providing data, CoCoRaHS strives to provide participants with brief, interesting and useful educational messages each time they enter an observation online. With just a few paragraphs, CoCoRaHS “covers the waterfront” with a variety of educational "Messages of the Day", including weekly and monthly series on a variety of weather and climate topics. Current series include “Drought Impacts Reporting”, “All about Hail”, “How your data are used”, “NOAA Awareness Weeks” and the “50 state ‘state climates' series”. Additional varied messages feature NOAA's Centers and products, tips on how to measure and report accurately, facts about precipitation, interesting related web sites (National Phenology Network, the American Meteorolgical Society, Weatherwise Magazine and more) as well promote fun CoCoRaHS activities such as “CoCoRaHS March Madness” and the “2011 CoCoRaHS Rain Gauge Calendar”. Messages are normally provided in a seasonal context quietly making a point of the critical role and significance of changing seasons in our climate system.

Each year, new topics are added. We plan new series on “The Water Cycle and Evapotranspiration”, “The Effects of Climate on Agriculture and Gardening” and “Snow, Snow and more Snow!” for the year ahead to be interspersed with other seasonal topics. We will highlight some of our current series of topical messages and share our vision for further educational ideas promoting climate literacy going forward. ract 178417 modified by 129.82.49.173 on 7-26-2010-->