SEQUIM — The University of Washington is seeking Olympic Peninsula residents willing to buy rain gauges and participate in a study of the area’s rain and snow.
The study is intended to calibrate and validate precipitation measurements made by the Global Precipitation Measurement constellation of satellites.
“It’s important to be able to measure rainfall from space so we can get a complete picture of rainfall distribution for applications like flooding, rain and snow storms, droughts and water supply,” explained Lynn McMurdie with UW’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences.
The program is conducted in a partnership between NASA and NASDA, Japan’s space agency, which in February 2014 launched a satellite with a dual frequency radar and passive microwave sensors that measure precipitation over the Earth.
The satellite serves as a calibration reference for a constellation of satellites operated by several countries all over the world in connection with ground validation field campaigns.
One such campaign will be conducted from this November through February 2016 on the Olympic Peninsula.
The primary goal of this campaign, called Olympex, is to validate rain and snow measurements falling in weather systems moving across the Peninsula on the ground and to ensure it matches the data collected by the measurement satellites.
The Olympic Peninsula is an ideal location to conduct a ground campaign because it reliably receives among the highest annual precipitation amounts in North America, scientists with the project said.
As part of the current gear-up phase, the Olympex team is asking the community for help.
Residents from around the state, but especially from the Olympic Peninsula and Chehalis River basin to the south, are being sought to monitor precipitation.
Volunteers will buy $30 rain gauges online at the Ambient weather site at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-raingauges and register online at the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network website, http://cocorahs.org.
After registering, purchasing and receiving the equipment, volunteers will install the rain gauges on their properties.
“Gauges need to be in an open area where there isn’t any blockage by buildings or trees,” McMurdie said.
Volunteers will be encouraged to check how much snow or rain has been collected by their gauge at the same time each morning and report the measurement by computer to the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) site at http://cocorahs.org.
Data derived from volunteers inside the study area will be entered into the NASA project database.
“We are interested in adding gauges throughout the Olympic Peninsula and further south into the Chehalis river drainage area,” McMurdie said.
Data will be available in real time, said Karin Bumbaco, assistant state climatologist with the Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean.
It will appear on the CoCoRaHS website map at http://tinyurl.com/PDN-cocorahsmap.
“Although our primary interest is on the wet side of the Olympics, we are also interested in how the wet side transitions to the dry side” such as Port Angeles, Sequim and Port Townsend, he said.
“So we’re happy with any volunteers anywhere in these general areas.”
The data also will be used by UW doctoral student Diana Gergel, who is installing rain gauges throughout the Chehalis River basin to understand how satellite precipitation estimates match up with actual river flows.
This will help to predict flooding throughout the region by building better models that use satellite data to forecast extreme precipitation events.
For more information about the volunteer rain-gauge program contact Bumbaco at 206-543-3145 or kbumbaco@uw.edu.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
