Nearly every day, Dan Mackeen checks the rain gauge outside his home. He's a volunteer weather observer with CoCoRaHS, a nationwide program which fills in the gaps by measuring rain, hail and snow between the official observation sites maintained by the National Weather Service. Mackeen got involved after moving to Great Falls two years ago, "i said, 'hey, let's do this' and bought a rain gauge and entered my information and good to go. We're so data sparse that the more data the better."

After a severe 1997 flood, brought on by nearly a foot of rainfall, devestated Fort Collins, Colorado, researchers at Colorado State University put together CoCoRaHS, or the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow network. Montana established its first CoCoRaHS site in 2006. Ben Schott, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Great Falls, is the area co-ordinator for CoCoRaHS, "it allows us to know the variation in the precip across the area," he says, "there are a lot of times where one community may get just a few hundredths of an inch of precip and just five or six miles away may get close to half an inch."

For years, national weather service observers have maintained sites called a cotton boxes, which records minimum and maximum temperatures. But setting up a rain gauge everywhere is expensive, so the National Weather Service relies on CoCoRaHS observers to fill in the fine details of how much and when rain falls.

"Well, when I measure snow, this time of the year, you pull the funnel and graticule off," says Brent Lee a CoCoRaHS observer in Highwood. He says it's extremely easy and inexpensive to get involved "They gave us a rain gauge i had to purchase..it wasn't to much money, its a manual gauge with graticules. The CoCoRaHS website was very easy and very straight forward...almost anyone can utilize it."

All you need to take part is a twenty five dollar rain gauge and a computer with internet access. a flat piece of wood like this will help measure snow fall and styrofoam wrapped in alumnimum foil to measure hail size.

In our part of the region, right now," Schott says, "We have just under fifty observers, which isn't a whole lot. I would love to try to double that number if at all possible."

The National Weather Service will hold CoCoRaHS training classes in the coming months, but online training is available through the program's website: http://www.cocorahs.org