Something to Crow About

As many of you know I am a weather guy. For the last 23 1/2 years I have attempted to "discern the will of God" (that's what the Taliban accused the Afghan meteorologists of doing- calling them wizards and disbanding the met service when they took over. But I digress..) Ihave been part of Air Force Weather since 1985.

My love of weather can be traced to the many stories of thunderstorms that my pilot dad used to share with me at my repeated requests. I think my interest in weather was also encouraged by the fact that I grew up in west Texas in a town called San Angelo. San Angelo was built at the junction of the Concho river and others yet still on the edge of the desert. Though a number of dams create some semblance of lakes they often suffer in the inevitable dry spells and the "river" which I grew up a mere block from, would often be shallow enough you could walk across. Hurricanes for San Angelo were a looked forward to event as it was the only way to fill up the lakes.

Thus, everyone talked about the weather and celebrated the rains when they came, so that the cotton fields would survive. There used to be a tradition that when it rained the local newspaper ("The Standard Times") mascot (a rooster) would be shown in the morning paper as crowing. Rain is a big deal in Texas. Especially in San Angelo.

Well Austin has suffered it's own drought of late. We are about 25 inches shy of where we are normally as far as rainfall goes. So bear with me as I take this moment to "crow" about our rainfall over the lst three days:

Date Precip
03/12/2009 1.61
03/13/2009 0.50
03/14/2009 0.26

Totals : 2.37

As an aside, I am a member of the CoCoRaHS. CoCoRaHS is an acronym for the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network. CoCoRaHS is a unique, non-profit, community-based network of volunteers of all ages and backgrounds working together to measure and map precipitation (rain, hail and snow). By using low-cost measurement tools, stressing training and education, and utilizing an interactive Web-site, our aim is to provide the highest quality data for natural resource, education and research applications. We currently operate in many states across the country.

Are you a fellow weather geek/fanatic? If you are interested in joining CoCoRaHS you can follow the links for more information.