CoCoRaHS Rain Gauge Rally contest has moved to April in 2026

Many of you have been wondering: how come our traditional CoCoRaHS Rain Gauge Rally contest isn't going on right now?  Great question! Starting in 2026, the contest will now take place in April.  So this year, you still have time to gear up and think of who you might like to recruit as a new observer in your state.  For more about our upcoming annual contest, please visit our Rally homepage which will be active soon.

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How to Correct a Multi-Day Amount Submitted as a Daily Amount

Situation: you are gone for the weekend, and on Monday morning, you need to report your weekend precipitation accumulation. In an early morning fog you log on to CoCoRaHS, enter your precipitation amount, and click Submit. Gaackk!! You realize you just entered your weekend accumulation as a daily amount. So, you pull up the multi-day accumulation report, enter the dates and your amount, and click Submit. The screen lights up in red text: Errors: This multi-day report would overlap with daily report on DD/MM/2026. Failed to save the Multiple Day Precipitation Accumulation Report. Great.....now what?

As long as you have a valid amount on the conflicting daily report you will get an error. In order to submit the multi-day report, FIRST edit your daily report and set your erroneous daily report amount to NA, then Submit. Now, you can go ahead and enter the multi-day report without generating an error. There is one last step you need to do to make this a clean operation. Send an email to qc@cocorahs.org with your station number and the date of the NA'ed daily report. We will make sure the daily report is removed from the database. If it is not, then your observations will not list correctly when you list your data using the Station Precip Summary or Station Snow Summary.Note that you must set any daily report in the multi-day range to NA before you will be able to submit the Multi-Day Report.

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The "Total SWE Monday" Habit . . . Please give it a try!

The National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center utilizes CoCoRaHS reports of precipitation, snowfall, snow depth and the water equivalent of the snow on the ground every day. CoCoRaHS data provide critical "Ground Truth" information that can improve the skill of their products and models. This will improve the accuracy of flood forecasts in the coming weeks and months. Click here to see how your CoCoRaHS SWE Reports are used by NOHRSC

Their guidance to us has been that if you can only report once a week, it’s best to report on the same day. Monday was chosen:

"The analysts at NOHRSC prefer a Total Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) observation taken once a week on Monday. The simple reason is that digging cores every day ruins your sample snowfield area (unless you have a big yard or open fields nearby).

A flood of Monday-morning SWE reports gives us a clearer picture of the overall snowpack than a few scattered results trickling in throughout the week. Daily total SWE would be great, but let's make "Total SWE Monday" a habit.

(Note: If you have the room, more frequent observations are appreciated, especially when conditions are changing. For areas that only infrequently get snow, there is no need to wait for Monday -- report SWE whenever you have the chance. For instructions on how to take core samples and report the snowpack SWE, please view our on-line training materials on snow: Training Slide Shows or watch the YouTube short animation on: SWE.