Weather evangelist
Award punctuates a life of passion — for precipitation
Weather network blossomed after 1997 Spring Creek flood
Reporter-Herald staff writer
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As a boy, he would stare past the storefronts and the grain elevator, past the railroad tracks to towering thunderheads marching across the Illinois plains.
Those billowing, cottony tops inspired a need in Nolan Doesken to unravel the secrets of weather and a dream of a life far away from his hometown of Royal, Ill.
But he never dreamed his boyhood passion for precipitation would lead to national recognition as an environmental hero.
On Friday in Washington, D.C., Doesken, 55, was presented with the 2007 Environmental Hero award by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for founding the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network.
“It feels really weird,” Doesken, Colorado’s state climatologist, said Wednesday. “I don’t feel like an environmental hero. I’m just trying to be helpful.”
He places the laurels upon the thousands of volunteers in his network.
“Weather and climate is like the science of the people,” he said. “All of our lives and livelihoods are affected by the weather.”
Summers of Storms
Doesken grew up in a farming community of about 200 people. His father was a preacher, his mother a teacher, and he was the youngest of three children.
He said he’s been interested in weather since birth, but his earliest memories stem from about age 4 or 5. He said he would talk about the weather to sell newspapers to the farmers at the grain elevator every morning.
Doesken bragged that his high school has been hit by two tornadoes since he graduated. And the ice storms, he said, were amazing.
Like the farmers in the community, his father kept a weather journal with daily records of temperatures, rainfall and observations.
Doesken pored over the journal, not only to look up the weather on key dates, such as his birthday, but to see the ebb and flow of weather patterns over time — climatology.
But for all his interest in weather, Doesken didn’t think he could make a living as a climatologist.
“I’d never seen anybody do it,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t going to be a preacher.”
He thought about urban planning and psychology, but he knew only weather could motivate him to succeed.
Doesken attended the University of Michigan for its meteorology program. But he became truly driven after he was turned down for a weather research job after his freshman year and spent the summer working at a factory cleaning caps and gowns for graduation ceremonies.
Dejected but determined, Doesken applied again the next year for the research job at the Metropolitan Meteorological Experiment in St. Louis, Mo.
He admits begging was involved.
“I turned it in as early as I could, and I begged, and I really wanted the job,” he said.
He got it, and soon he was bunked in a one-room dormitory with several other research assistants to study the heat island effect — whether heat radiation from a large city affects weather downwind.
Doesken said he didn’t like school much, but he kept his eye on the prize, his head down, and studied hard.
Over the next four summers, he lived his dream, in a cramped dormitory with a bunch of “weather nuts.”
“School was hard, school was no fun,” Doesken said. “Summer was what I lived for.”
In 1977, Doesken started working as assistant state climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He still works there, now as state climatologist.
Network Genesis
On July 28, 1997, a series of storms dropped up to a foot of rain west of Fort Collins. The Spring Creek flood killed five people and caused millions of dollars in damage.
It took meteorologists weeks to piece together exactly how much rain fell. One of Doesken’s first calls was to Andy Pineda.
He knew Pineda had a rain gauge in the yard of his north Fort Collins home. Pineda said Doesken was surprised at the lack of rain gauges in the area.
“‘As much as we value water here, we don’t have much of a rain-gauge network,’” Pineda recalls Doesken saying.
He decided to do something about it. Nearly a year after the flood, Doesken founded CoCoRaHS, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network.
The system established a network of spotters whose reports can provide early warning about severe weather. If the National Weather Service had received such reports as the Spring Creek flood was building, lives could have been saved downstream, he said.
Today, the network includes 18 states and the District of Columbia, and more than 2,000 volunteers who report regularly. Doesken said the program signed up its 8,000th volunteer last month.
Pineda, a water resources engineer for the Northern Water Conservancy District, was a quick convert to CoCoRaHS. He said Doesken’s zeal for weather draws people to the program.
“People will bend over backwards for this man,” Pineda said. “His volunteers are like groupies.”
Doesken’s enthusiasm shows when he talks to volunteers. At a CoCoRaHS orientation earlier this month, Doesken showed with excited gestures how the rain gauge works. Volunteers laughed at the jokes he sprinkled throughout his hour-long presentation at the Fort Collins Harmony Library.
CoCoRaHS national coordinator Henry Reges said Doesken cares about the weather and people alike.
“He wants to do things to help better climate data and make things better for people,” Reges said.
Sometimes, Doesken wonders what would have happened if CoCoRaHS were in place in 1997. Sometimes, he wonders “what if?”
What if Fort Collins residents had alerted the proper authorities about the heavy rain?
What if he had reported his own observations that night?
“I got to see what happened when I didn’t call in my report of heavy rainfall,” he said. “One person can help and save the lives of people downstream.”
- By Kate Martin
- Reporter-Herald Staff Writer
Nolan Doesken founded the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network in 1998, one year after the Fort Collins Spring Creek flood killed five people.
The network started with 50 volunteers in Fort Collins, but by the second year, it had grown to include about 100 in Larimer, Weld and Adams counties.
He said the results were almost immediate.
“It’s so amazing to see, once you have a lot of people close together, how rainfall really is variable,” said Doesken. “Storms can truly only hit one part of town and miss another.”
And hail, he said, is even more localized. Network volunteers place pads made of craft foam and aluminum foil to record hail data. Scientists study the pads to track hailstorms.
The program got a boost in 2000, when Doesken received a two-year National Science Foundation grant for $90,000.
“It extended us to eastern Colorado,” Doesken said.
By 2003, Doesken said Kansas and Wyoming wanted to join the precipitation network, and in 2004, residents in Glenwood Springs joined.
“When CoCoRaHS takes off is when we find someone who loves it like we do,” Doesken said. “We need a local motivator.”
Today, 18 states and Washington, D.C., are part of the rain, hail and snow network, with South Dakota slated to come on board by June 1 with dedicated volunteers.
The data are used by a number of agencies, including the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District and the National Weather Service.
CoCoRaHS volunteers also can file reports of intense weather online, which often are included in National Weather Service bulletins.
To date, more than 8,000 volunteers have signed up to take weather measurements and submit them to the Web site. More than 2,000 members actively send in data every day, Doesken said.
How to join the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network:
Read some of the material on the CoCoRaHS network site, www.cocorahs.org.
When you are ready:
• Visit the Web site.
• Click the link “join CoCoRaHS.”
• Fill out your personal information, including postal address, buy a 4-inch-diameter rain gauge and train either online or at a training session.
Originally published April 22, 2007.