There is a new weatherman in town!

            I have always had an interest in weather such as chasing storms or lightning. I scared my wife once in Kansas because I was trying to find a tornado...but no such luck. While searching weather in our area I noticed a couple of voluntary sites connected with NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

          I called Mark Tuner, the NOAA representative in Spokane, and asked if I could volunteer for any weather observation. He explained that "official" stations are limited to one every 25 miles but he then asked to come up to the house when he found out where we lived.

         Mark really wanted some observations from my area and told me about CoCoRaHS, a co-op of volunteers across the nation of which he supervises the Eastern Washington group. I'd like nothing more than to help out and learn more about weather. Mark, with a laugh, gave me with an official rain-gage after I showed him my $1.99 one from Ace Hardware.

Mark suggested two area's in my yard, one for the rain-gage and an other for my weather station. When I first started pounding the steel stake in the ground I got nowhere, nada and zilch. The top soil was frozen solid down four inches which required me to first use a chisel and hammer down to soft soil so I could then pound that baby down to the depth I need.

CoCoRaHS (Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network) is a group of over 4000 stations across the nation reporting every day their weather to NOAA who uses all the reports in building forecasts and maps.

Following Marks directions (not my strongest trait) I sunk the pole to the depth needed and lucky for me it was rather plumb.

I cut and sanded the 4x4 that will forever hold the gage.

I used braces to attach the 4x4 to the steel post...you can see our future garden behind me.

Here is the finished gage, ready for the first storm. My job is to go out every morning, at approximately the same time, and measure what precipitation has fallen in the previous 24 hours. If no rain or snow has fallen they would also like to know that and I would report 0.00. The gage has a 4 inch capacity and produced by the U.S. Department of Commerce NOAA-National Weather Service. My "official" weather map designation is, WA-ST-14.

Mounted, with less precision, is a snow depth board and calibrated 40 inch stick. Although it hasn't rained we did have an unexpected snowstorm the day after thanksgiving where I measured our snow and reported .9 tenths of snow to NOAA.

CoCoRaHS website provides us with some great online lessons on how to take measurements, converting snow into water content for the report along with many other weather related lessons.

My weather station came a few days later which gave me plenty of time to chisel out another hole in the back yard for the steel stake to which a 1 1/2" galvanized pipe is used to secure the station about 8 feet high. If anyone has a question in the back of their mind such as "does he own more than one sweatshirt"? Yes, a store I'd rather not name, had these for $1.00...yep, a buck! I bought as many as I could.:-)

The Davis Vantage Vue weather station is not the best, but also not a cheap station...sort of in the middle. After setting longitude/latitude we receive temperature inside and out, humidity for both, barometric pressure, wind speed and rainfall. You might ask why not just use the weather stations rainfall measurements...they are not nearly as exacting as the one I get from the front yard gage.

The console for the Davis weather station receives all the information by wifi which is good for me since mounting it on the back hill could of presented a problem going up or down with snow and ice. The console provides all the info plus the ability to create graphs. Next week I should receive the USB software so all information can be automatically uploaded to CWOP, Citizen Weather Observer Program.

Other than the blog I needed a hobby in retirement...this should suffice for some of my time at no more expense going forward.