As someone who has used dozens of weather and climate datasets over her career, many of which incorporate weather observations from non-professionals, I’d like to take a moment to salute the weather nerds out there. Thank you for your excitement over storms, snow, and rapidly-moving cold fronts.
Through programs like NOAA’s Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) program, we get vital national and global insight into what’s happening now and over time, and literally anyone who has interest can join and help.
There are also now programs where citizens can help to document changes in our environment, such as Monarch Watch, and Audubon’s Climate Watch (starting next week for 2022).
But throughout our scientific and environmental history, citizens have been playing an enormously important role. Some of our oldest weather observations1 come from people who just noted the conditions in their daily journal (including Ben Franklin and other Founding Fathers) and they have helped us piece together our understanding of the climate from before we had instruments, (along with natural archives like tree rings and lake sediments.) Among other things, it helps us understand that the climate we are now seeing is ‘not normal’, relative to the past!
So Happy Weather Observer’s Day!
Maybe consider becoming a citizen scientist in your own part of the world!
About 42 million imaged pages of diary and other sources of weather information exist in NOAA’s archives.