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Yesterday’s storm brought a tad more than a tenth of an inch of rain at the National Weather Service’s Albuquerque airport rain gauge. But as readers often remind me, it rained a whole lot more/a whole lot less at my house! Why do they only measure it at the airport?
The short answer is that you have to put your weather station someplace, and the federal government has long funded sophisticated and relatively expensive weather stations at airports because of the importance of the data for aviation safety. But our weather is so variable that that one airport number will almost certainly be different than other parts of the city.
The longer answer is that there isn’t really just one Albuquerque number. There are lots of different weather data collection systems, run by different entities and collecting the information for different purposes. If you want to know how much rain fell in your neighborhood, the best option is CoCoRaHS. It’s a network of volunteer observers around the country with rain gauges in their yards who report in once a day. The typical reporting is 7 a.m., which gives you a look at how much fell in the previous 24 hours. The CoCoRaHS folks have recently added a nifty new mapping tool that allows you to zoom in to your neighborhood and see how much rain was reported.
Jan. 26, 2013 Albuquerque rainfall
On the actual map (obviously not my screenshot) you can click on any dot and see how much was recorded at that gauge.
“But wait,” you might say. “This doesn’t help me. There’s no data for my neighborhood.”
You can fix that by signing up as a CoCoRaHS volunteer. (Disclosure: One of the blue dots, down near UNM, is me.)
-- Email the reporter at jfleck@abqjournal.com. Call the reporter at 505-823-3916
