An international weather-monitoring group is looking for volunteers to help find out exactly how much precipitation is falling in Windsor and Essex County.
The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network keeps watch over precipitation in North America through rain gauges installed in volunteers’ yards. Each day volunteers record the data and pass it on to the network, which in turn passes it on to weather services and meteorologists.
But Windsor-Essex has few volunteers, creating a gap in how the area’s precipitation is understood.
“We don’t have very many volunteers (in Windsor), less than a handful,” said Karla Jackson, the group’s provincial co-ordinator. “You could have someone living in Maidstone where their closest monitoring station is at the airport. The weather isn’t the same between those two locations.”
In addition to having more precise data, more volunteers could help meteorologists find trends in the region’s rainfall, she said.
“You could say some parts of southern Essex County had record rainfall but the northern part was dry, without the data you have trouble making that statement,” Jackson said. “It’s good to have the data to do some analysis and see what actually happened.”
It doesn’t take much to volunteer and all are welcome, Jackson said. Volunteers only need one of the network’s standardized $30 rain gauges and the discipline to keep sending the records in at the same time each day between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m.
“We’d like to have a couple volunteers in every town or area,” Jackson said. “We’d like to have maybe 20-25 people in Essex, but there’s really no limit.”
Anyone interested can sign up on the groups website at cocorahs.org/canada/.
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