IN MARCH 2003 A SNOWSTORM WAS FORECAST FOR COLORADO’S FRONT Range. This was business as usual for the Denver area. “Our local meteorologists give forecasts for ski resorts and the Denver city limits. That doesn’t tell me anything,” explains Vivian Kientz. “If a true upslope was coming, I’d have it bad.” Kientz lives a mere fifteen miles from the outskirts of Denver, on the north-facing slope of a mountain. The term upslope refers to an air system traveling along the ground that is forced to rise when it meets a mountain slope; when the air rises, it cools and water vapor condenses into rain. Because precipitation changes based on the terrain, and the terrain varies greatly over short distances, a reliable forecast practically needs to be tailored for every valley and ridge. For such a personalized forecast, Kientz visits the website of the National Weather Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and enters her exact latitude and longitude.
“Everyone was clueless,” she tells me in 2014, recalling the events of 2003, when a true upslope was forecast that would bring several feet of snow. She warned all her friends and neighbors, who ran to the grocery store to buy candles, food, beer, and other provisions.
Meanwhile, Kientz went to the hardware store to supplement her weather-monitoring supplies. Her precipitation gauge is a standard-issue double cylinder. The narrow inner cylinder, with demarcated lines like a ruler, catches rain caught by a wider funnel on its top; it holds up to an inch of rainwater. The outer cylinder is four inches wide and is used to catch snowfall by removing the funnel and inner cylinder at the right time (when merited according to the forecast). For the expected blizzard, Kientz needed a longer outer cylinder and bought a several-foot stretch of four-inch-wide stovepipe. She also needed a snow board; not a snowboard for descending a mountain or doing tricks in a half-pipe, but simply a sixteen-inch-square piece of plywood, painted white, to serve as a sampling area.
In October 2002 Kientz had seen an ad in the local newspaper seeking volunteers for the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network; this mouthful goes by the acronym CoCoRaHS (pronounced “cocoa rahs”). Since joining, she has not missed a single day of collecting precipitation data. A Tennessee native transplanted to Colorado twenty-five years ago, she has grown accustomed to snow at any time of year—even summer. She grew up with rain, “five inches at a time back in western Tennessee,” she explains on the phone from her home in Colorado, where she hardly gets rain at all. Most weather systems cross North America from the west heading east; most precipitation is dropped on the west side of the Rocky Mountains. Consequently, the east side of the range, called the rain shadow, is quite dry. As Kientz relates, “When people here say, ‘Oh, it rained today,’ I’m like, ‘What? You call that rain?’” Despite having multiple sclerosis, which has Kientz intermittently in and out of a wheelchair, she always shovels a path through the snow to take CoCoRaHS readings. She declares herself an expert at “knowing the weather for my one spot on earth.” She’s enough of an expert to know that the growing season is too short for gardens. She has a greenhouse measuring ten feet by thirty feet, where she grows hundreds of cactus, orchids, and exotic plants. She knows exactly when her driveway will freeze, and when it will thaw. She knows when she’ll be able to dig herself out, and when to call someone with a plow.
The day before the storm, Nolan Doesken, a Colorado climatologist and the founder and director of CoCoRaHS, had sent an e-mail that explained to participants that their mission, should they choose to accept it, would involve extra work to get good measurements for this particular snowfall. Since snow accumulates at different densities, participants collect measurements on snow depth and water content; this is called the snow water equivalent ratio. For a blizzard, participants need a yardstick (because a one-foot desk ruler is too short) to measure depth on the snow board. Then they collect one column of snow in their four-inch-wide gauge. They turn the gauge upside down, drive it like a cookie-cutter into the snow on the board, invert the board and gauge as though turning a cake from its baking pan onto a cooling rack (or putting a spatula under it), and then wipe the board clean and let more snow accumulate. For a big storm with more than twelve inches of new snowfall expected, they have to repeatedly measure snow as it accumulates (or, if they want to sleep all night, like Kientz they buy a long stovepipe to get a deep sample in the morning). Participants bring each snow sample inside to slowly melt and then pour the liquid into their rain gauge to measure the amount. Typical measurements during the 2003 storm were ratios around eight to one (where eight inches of snow melted to one inch of water), which is wet, heavy, sticky snow. Snowboarders and skiers like fluffy, powdery snow with a ratio of fifteen to one or higher.
The storm arrived in the early afternoon of March 17, 2003, and ended on March 19, the day US troops invaded Iraq. Snow fell for three days in what meteorologist Doug Wesley calls “a climatological anomalous snowstorm,” and it came down fast; hundreds of roofs collapsed under the weight of so much wet snow. Highways were closed, and people were stranded at Denver International Airport and surrounding ski resorts. Thousands of drivers sought refuge in Red Cross shelters and hotels.
Kientz bundled up and went outside to take measurements of the snow with the dedication of a school kid memorizing multiplication tables. She is a relatively tall woman, at five feet eleven inches, but the snow eventually surpassed her height. All told, she measured seventy inches (six feet) of snow in her one spot on earth, while reports indicated that more than five feet of heavy snowfall covered most of the region. In the weeks following, Denver residents filed over $100 million in insurance claims.
Most people recognized the storm’s silver lining: the massive precipitation brought an end to an extreme drought, at least in that region.
Another silver lining was the research opportunity it presented. It was a perfect storm for a citizen science event because (1) meteorologists knew something big was brewing; (2) they had an army of trained volunteers in the bull’s-eye; and (3) they had the ability (via e-mail) to communicate with volunteers to prepare and encourage them to do the extra hard work. “In 2003, people were still reading e-mails,” muses Doesken (each year, about 60 percent of CoCoRaHS participants return from the previous year, but volunteer fatigue is a general issue in citizen science), “and people stepped up and took this as a challenge.”
The legacy of harnessing the power of dedicated volunteer weather observers in the United States can be traced back to as early as 1776. When Thomas Jefferson wasn’t busy penning the Declaration of Independence, he was devising a plan to deputize one person in each county in Virginia with a thermometer, a wind vane, and instructions to log observations of temperature and wind direction twice daily. Jefferson experimented with the most high-tech weather devices of his era, including rain gauges and barometers; he is the United States’ original weather bug. He was diligent in record keeping and, like Kientz, abhorred gaps in his data.
Yet Jefferson was not setting a new trend by observing weather. The tradition of collecting weather data is as old as civilization. The oldest known written weather records are inscribed on “oracle bones” from the Shang dynasty in China (eighteenth to twelfth century BCE). Shang diviners used sharp knives to engrave ox bones and turtle shells with weather records. They would first inscribe questions on the bones or shells, apply heat until the bone or shell cracked, and then interpret the crack to make a prediction. The questions were sometimes about weather, and the predictions were early weather forecasts. Sometimes the diviners would follow up and inscribe the actual weather outcome—called the verification—on the same pieces of bone or shell (which are now considered valuable as artifacts). Sadly, the records are not a complete representation of time; they were never intended to be daily records, as such documents commonly would be today. But today these oracle bones, about 150,000 of which remain in collections, are of interest to climate researchers. (Unfortunately, prior to about 1900, when such records were discovered, the oracle bones were mistaken for Pleistocene fossils, called dragon bones, and ground up and taken as medicine: the plastrons were used to treat malaria, and poultices made from ox bones were used to heal knife wounds).
Later dynasties kept records of unusual weather, as well as phenological records of the blooming dates of flowering trees. By around 100 BCE, the Chinese had techniques to measure rainfall and snowfall, but there are no extant descriptions of how this was done, so it will remain an ancient Chinese secret. They used weathercocks for wind direction, and wind flags—poles with feathers—to estimate wind speed. They even measured humidity in a coarse way based on the heaviness of charcoal.
Though weather data preceded formal science, a scientific dispute motivated Jefferson’s particular desire for county-by-county precipitation data: he wanted evidence that he hoped would refute a European claim, the theory of degeneracy: the reprehensible idea that the temperature and humidity of the New World produced animals that were smaller, weaker, and just plain inferior to their European counterparts. The impetus to douse this claim was strong, because the theory was developed by a Frenchman, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who—remarkably, for his time—classified humans as part of the animal kingdom. Thus his theory amounted to the French smacking a white glove against the cheek of the new Americans. As a relative newcomer to the New World, Jefferson had little data to support counterclaims of superiority. It was the patriotic chip on the founding father’s shoulder that sparked his realization that the scientific strength of a country lay in its people.
With daily weather data Jefferson planned to develop his own theory of climate. Unfortunately the Revolutionary War took priority over a systematic statewide plan for data collection. Nevertheless, from 1776 to 1816, President Jefferson and many of his recruits (including explorers Lewis and Clark) kept a near complete series of weather observations. Ultimately, Jefferson used the weather data, including that of five years he spent in France, to show that America had a higher sunny-to-cloudy-day ratio than Europe.
Despite a century of interest and instrumentation, forecasting the weather remained locked down to local observations and folklore. Rules of thumb included such forecasts as “If rain falls during an east wind, it will continue a full day” and “When deer are in gray coat in October, expect a severe winter.” My favorite are folklore rhymes, like “Clear moon, frost soon” and “Hark! I hear the asses bray, we shall have some rain today.” Folklore was replaced with real observations by 1845, when use of the telegraph became widespread. The roots of a federal weather forecasting program started simply, as people in Virginia could telegraph people in New York to say what weather was on the way. Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the then new Smithsonian Institution, started organizing the relay of weather communications. “A system of observation which shall extend as far as possible over the North American continent,” Henry wrote, with the vision that “the extended lines of the telegraph will furnish a ready means of warning the more northern and eastern observers to be on the watch from the first appearance of an advancing storm.” By 1848, volunteer observers were actively recruited and telegraph companies allowed weather reports to be transmitted to the Smithsonian free of charge. By 1850, over 150 volunteers were reporting regularly. By 1860, daily telegraphed weather reports were printed in the Washington Evening Star. It was decades of telegraph use to relay messages of bad weather and war tragedies that prompted Western Union to introduce the singing telegram in the 1930s in hopes of employing the medium to bring happy news.
The telegraphed reports in the 1860s were about observed, not predicted, weather. Cooperation among states stalled during the Civil War years, but soon after it was viewed as the government’s duty to provide forecasts to prevent weather-related tragedies. An act of Congress in 1870, signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant, required the secretary of war to take meteorological observations across the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic coast. In 1872, another act of Congress extended the service to the entire United States “for the benefit of commerce and agriculture.” The Signal Service Corps led the charge and would fly different flags (for example, a red square with a dark center meant a storm, and two of those meant a hurricane) in the middle of towns as their way of letting people know what sort of weather was coming. Subsequent problems with embezzlement and other scandals led President Benjamin Harrison to move the national weather service from the War Department to the Department of Agriculture in 1890.
President Harrison charged the Department of Agriculture’s new civilian agency, the Weather Bureau,3 with relying heavily on volunteer observers. These volunteer efforts were the precursor to what is now better known as the National Weather Service’s Cooperative Weather Observer Network,4 which draws about one million volunteer hours annually at twelve thousand sites across all fifty states. There is approximately one network station for every five hundred square miles, and without the network we would often get caught in the rain and we’d know much less about climate trends. This program is part of why Kientz was able to use her latitude and longitude to get a fine-scale forecast for her side of the mountain in Colorado before the big storm. Cooperative weather observers receive certificates of appreciation every five years; those who observe for sixty years or longer receive a letter signed by the president of the United States. Recipients of a letter from the president include Edward Stoll, who observed for seventy-six years in Arapahoe, Nebraska, Ruby Stufft, who observed for seventy years in Elsmere, Nebraska, and Richard Hendrickson, of Bridgehampton, on Long Island, New York, who began as a cooperative weather observer in 1930, when he was eighteen years old, and has continued for over eighty years.
The CoCoRaHS was borne not from the wisdom of a past president or an innovation such as the telegraph but of a tragic error in forecasting. In 1997, meteorologists in Fort Collins, Colorado, misjudged the severity of an imminent rainstorm. Unlike the biblical character Noah, NOAA’s examination of the heavens did not reveal a prophecy of a flood—just heavy rains. But a flood came nonetheless. A small area near the foothills at the base of the Rockies received 14.5 inches in just a few hours, while areas close by received no more than 2 inches. Only three weather stations existed in the entire community. The disaster led to the death of five people, millions of dollars in property damage and, eventually, the formation of CoCoRaHS.
Radar instruments, ground-based or on satellites, are great for predicting rainfall over large areas, but precipitation can be highly localized. It can rain, snow, or hail on one side of the street and be dry on the other. One county can experience floods while the neighboring county is in the midst of a drought. It goes against our concept of progress, but when it comes to precipitation, nothing high-tech in the sky can beat a low-tech gauge on the ground. For example, remote sensors cannot confidently distinguish rain from snow. Only data collected by home-based volunteers can provide the coverage and quality needed for the research opportunity presented by the anomalous snowstorm of 2003.
By braving the cold, Kientz and other volunteers provided evidence of remarkably localized patterns in snowfall and water content that helped weather forecasters realize the extreme geographic microvariation in precipitation. Doesken explained that all meteorologists recognize that precipitation is variable (annually and geographically), but admits that he did not fully appreciate the variation until seeing the CoCoRaHS data. This lesson led him to quit his common practice of interpolation of contour maps because he no longer feels that he has sufficient density of data. A thorough understanding of what we see in hindsight helps improve meteorological foresight. Wesley was the lead author of a paper that amounted to a postmortem of the storm and why it snowed where it did. The detailed dissection revealed how to refine the traditional understanding of how terrain shapes storm properties.
Wesley, a meteorologist in Alaska, regales me with sinister-sounding meteorological terms like cold-air damming and diabatic cooling. In Colorado, prevailing weather comes from the west. The tall Rocky Mountains slow the movement of the prevailing winds and the stalled clouds typically drop their precipitation on the west side. The west side of the Rockies is wet during the winter months; the east side (the area of the rain shadow) is dry. Conditions were different for the 2003 storm, which brought moist air from as far away as New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico and drove it up the east slope of the Rockies. But, as Wesley likes to emphasize, the easterly flow became blocked. The air should flow along the ground, and pressures should push it up and over the Rockies. But this particular easterly flow cooled so quickly that no amount of pressure was going to force it over the mountains. Instead the easterly flow billowed in front of the mountains and accumulated for six to twelve hours. This billowing mass of air acted like invisible mountain terrain and, in effect, displaced the storm by about twenty miles to the east, over cities and towns in the foothills and plains, rather than upon the upper reaches of the mountains. Precipitation fell as though the steepest terrain were near Interstate 25 in Denver rather than in the mountain terrain of Breckenridge.
When I ask Wesley about data quality, he says, “Sheer numbers outweigh problems. CoCoRaHS is a gold mine of data.” He did quality control checks, eliminating extreme high and low outliers: “Would you rather have five perfect observations, or one hundred, of which eighty are good?”
When I speak to Doesken, he laughs. “CoCoRaHS participants are younger than third graders, and over ninety. We can’t expect the same quality of data from all. The best tool for quality control is redundancy.” That means that if a second grader and a ninety-one-year-old neighbor get the same measurement, then the data are likely trustworthy.
CoCoRaHS participants are kindred spirits in terms of being bitten by the weather bug. Doesken knew that participants would step up their efforts to measure the storm because no one likes data gaps. He says he admires their dedication, and has frequently explained to the uninitiated that many participants will “check their rain gauge every day until they literally can’t move.” He used to say “until their dying day,” until he was told that the phrase was insensitive, but the perceived insensitivity stems from a truth: it is in fact common for people to collect data until they die.5 A case in point is Ned Somerville, who e-mailed Doesken, “I have only been with you only about a few years. I was a meteorologist in my military days, am 75 years, and am in my final weeks with cancer. From here on out, I will do the best I can to get the data in on time, but sometimes that will not be possible. Thank you. It’s been a fun job.”
Another came from a participant with an unusual name, Howard P. Howard, who wrote to Doesken a year before he died, “I wanted to thank you for recognizing the effort [of] many of us old/ailing volunteers. I don’t know how many others agree with me, but for many of us the days of once being the boss, the superintendent, president, foreman or any job that one has worked to fine tune a job over a life time and suddenly you are faced with retirement and or ill health, it is a very scary part of life. But being able to be affiliated with CoCoRaHS gives one a chance to do something worthy and for that I’m grateful.”
A social scientist might require more convincing, but receiving a stream of these e-mails over the years has led Doesken to believe that citizen science participation (and the sense of duty it carries) improves life—and may very well prolong it too.
• • •
I was raised to believe that weather makes for trifling, boring small talk and is therefore a safe subject to raise when conversing with strangers at the bus stop. To the contrary, weather is one of the strongest influences on human existence. Rain has shaped the daily life and plans of people since the very first parades, weddings, baseball games, picnics, perms, and suede shoes. I’d bet Homo sapiens has always been trying to predict how far it’s possible to stray from the mouth of the cave without something like an umbrella. Weather is so integral to our existence that we equate it with our moods: fights in movies take place when there’s lightning, tragedies during rain, and romance alongside rainbows.
Wilbur and Orville Wright grew up in Dayton, Ohio, but made the first powered flights in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, because they needed the town’s steady coastal winds (and its soft sand for landings). France and California are known for their vineyards because the moderate weather permits grapes to fully ripen. Weather has repeatedly played a hand in history. Monsoons will deter battles, snowstorms may block supply routes, and droughts will surely bring famine.
Weather can exert its impact on us in subtle ways. Antonio Stradivari relied on more than skill to make his famous, high quality, Stradivarius violins. He selected only wood that had grown slowly and evenly (with low density and a high modulus of elasticity)—specifically, wood from trees that grew in the weather of the Little Ice Age, a period spanning roughly the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Patterns of weather dictate where particular plants and crops can grow, and ultimately determine where we live: where our civilizations thrive and where they fail.
I meet another weather bug, David Herring, a modern-day deputy of Jefferson, as I pass through Richmond, Virginia. Grinning, he holds up a short pole with several spires. One spire has tiny cups that rotate horizontally in the wind; another has a compass wind vane; a third has a box that holds a rain gauge that automatically empties, and a fourth, which looks like a shock absorber, is for measuring temperature and humidity. Each spire is made of white plastic, looking like the battler armor of the imperial stormtroopers in the movie Star Wars. Herring is showing me his home weather station. “I’m not a gizmo type of person, but this is my pride and joy,” he says.
Herring explains that he thinks about weather every day. His home weather station electronically transmits to a computer tablet display that he keeps on his kitchen table. In his den Herring keeps a ship’s barometer, a weather gauge from the 1940s, and a German weather house in the design of a miniature alpine chalet. At first I thought the chalet was a cuckoo clock, but instead of having a pendulum timing the emergence of a cuckoo every hour, the weather house operates as a barometer: when the barometric pressure drops, a man with an umbrella rotates out; when the pressure rises, the man goes back into the house and, for the ensuing sunny day, a dainty blond woman rotates out.
Herring joined CoCoRaHS in 2010 and has since collected data from his (low-tech, CoCoRaHS-approved) rain gauge every day at 7:00 a.m. He explains his Jeffersonian morning routine: “Start the coffee, feed the dogs, and check the catch in the rain gauge.” When he goes out of town, his pet sitter takes over. As the county coordinator for CoCoRaHS, Herring is responsible for training incoming volunteers in his county. Other than initial trainings, he rarely sees other participants in person. Through the CoCoRaHS website and its newsletter, The Catch, participants can view each other’s data. During a recent tropical storm in Florida, Herring often viewed data from CoCoRaHs observers down there. Participants know that they are part of a collective effort, even though they operate in physical isolation from each other.
Herring speaks competently and matter-of-factly about his sales job in the home health care industry. In contrast, his eyes are ablaze when he talks about monitoring the weather. He vividly recalls when Hurricane David hit the Virginia Peninsula in 1979, flooding his hometown of Hampton. He witnessed his first tornado when he was eleven. He has seen many waterspouts, which Herring describes as harmless tornados over open water. At his home outside of Richmond, Virginia, Herring enjoys it when he can sit in his den with his son and daughter and “watch the needle drop.” He says “watch the needle drop” with a gusto that gives the impression he is a captain watching the ship’s barometer, anticipating the need to “batten down the hatches” and face battle with a storm.
Herring is computer savvy and loves his gadgets, but argues that he is “only twenty to thirty percent geek.” He shows me his flip phone as evidence: “Look at this, I’m prehistoric.” He is a beast when watching storms, hootin’ and hollerin’ as others might when watching Duke versus North Carolina in a NCAA championship game. Being a spectator of live storms, especially ones with lightning, hail, or strong winds, is not for the faint-hearted. For people like Herring, weather is best as a full-body experience. (Though putting safety first means staying inside during storms.)
Experiencing nature with all of one’s senses is the heart and soul of science. The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke was a champion of empiricism, the idea that we gain knowledge through experiences of our sensory perceptions. I go out and feel it is hot, use a thermometer to measure how intense the heat really is, and thus I have knowledge that it is hot. Sounds reasonable, almost simplistic. But in the late 1600s competing ideas were more commonly accepted. Philosophers believed that knowledge was innate (we are born with it), or derived from intuition (good hunches), or deduced (figured out by logic).
Experiencing nature with all of one’s senses is also the heart and soul of being human. Even though Jefferson wanted weather data to develop a theory of climate and prove North American superiority, he also had an almost spiritual inspiration in his deep-seated love of the seasons. On weather collection, Jefferson wrote, “Climate is one of the sources of the greatest sensual enjoyment.”
The scientific insights about storms and terrain as seen via CoCoRaHS data are the cake, and myriad practical applications of the data are the icing. The publically accessible, fine-scale data from CoCoRaHS, all volunteer collected, are used by meteorologists, claims adjusters, attorneys, construction businesses, utility companies, mosquito control experts, farmers, and urban planners, to name a few. In recent years CoCoRaHS began sharing the data for free, with no strings attached, though that makes it harder for the organization to track all the uses of that data. When people write to say thank you, then CoCoRaHS knows who is using the data and how. For example, CoCoRaHS knows that the Nappanee Missionary Church in northern Indiana uses volunteer-collected data from CoCoRaHS in negotiations when contracting with a company for winter snow removal.
In our market-driven world, the most convincing evidence of the importance of CoCoRaHS data may be the fact that private-sector companies take the publically available data and customize it for clients. For example, engineers and planners developing storm water management plans want gridded color maps that integrate data from multiple sources, including CoCoRaHS and NOAA. Insurance appraisers and roofers work like ambulance chasers, following severe weather events closely in order to be the first of their trade on the subsequent disaster scene. They understand that hailstorms are not uniform across town; they want to know where the weather hit worst so they can get there first.
In Virginia, Herring uses his weather knowledge in his job selling home health care equipment. He doesn’t want to deliver a cane or commode and ask, “How are you feeling today?” He knows they feel terrible, because most people who need home health care are ill or have limited mobility. Instead he’ll say, “You picked the perfect day to stay home, sunny all day, but tomorrow it will rain buckets.”
But talking about the weather can be political. “Do friends turn to you for opinions about climate change?” I ask him over lunch. Normally open and straightforward, now Herring hems and haws in discomfort. Instead of using the term climate change he notes that we are “putting a curve ball on natural changes,” “helping the weather be ornery,” or “making angry weather.” His politics pose an apparent internal conflict: he has a strong desire to see climate change stopped, but abhors taking away individual liberties. He has similar feelings about evolution, saying he attends church every Sunday, but that he believes in the “Darwin thing” (yes, he also avoids the term evolution). Ultimately the complexities of the situation make him feel as though his hands are tied. Yes, Herring reluctantly accepts that human activity is influencing the earth’s climate but, no, he does not share his views about climate change with his friends. He knows they would disagree.
Even though he feels helpless, recent research shows that Herring is actually in one of the best positions to make a difference regarding public opinion on climate change if he would talk to his friends. The gap between the serious threats from climate change and public policies has prompted a plethora of social science studies to understand how people form beliefs.
Yale University has several researchers, including Dan Kahan, examining how people form beliefs about climate change. Kahan’s team revealed that our minds work like a filter, accepting as true those messages from people in our own circle of influence and generally disregarding as false those messages from outsiders, people we don’t identify with. Herring’s demographic profile is similar to the average demographic profile of climate change deniers geographically, socially, religiously, and politically—you name it, Herring fits the bill.6 Therefore, if he were to tell friends that he thought humans were causing climate change and that it was urgent to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, his message would likely be heard by his peers; it wouldn’t be filtered out.
As far as data goes, it turns out that the ultrahigh variation in precipitation makes CoCoRaHS data not particularly useful for the study of climate change. Many decades—maybe centuries—of data would be needed to decipher trends in local variation. On the other hand, data since 1890 from the Cooperative Weather Observer Network have been the backbone of many a climate change model.
• • •
Thomas Jefferson explicitly acknowledged the rights and responsibilities of citizens in self-governance when he prepared the US Constitution. I wonder how different the United States might be today had he been able to implement a system that explicitly assumed rights and responsibilities of all Americans as citizens of scientific endeavors. Jefferson claimed that a nation can never be both ignorant and free. Freedom, via democracy as he conceived of it, requires an intelligent, informed populace capable and willing to learn. Instead of relying solely on a free press and public education to keep people from ignorance, Jefferson knew that citizens could also be part of science to guide their own education and discovery. Collecting weather data can be a simple civic duty, and the National Weather Service and CoCoRaHS programs are embodiments of Jefferson’s dream.
Jefferson may have hopped a stagecoach to share observations with friends, and of course could never have envisioned that, with a few taps on a keyboard, observations could be shared globally and archived in perpetuity. Like the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s vision for collective science relied on people relishing civic duty and claiming their right to be informed and educated in order to self-govern and curb corruption, privilege, and aristocracy. The United States is becoming a citizen science nation. Whether or not Herring identifies with Jefferson, he, Kientz, and millions like them embody Jefferson’s values. To imagine what Jefferson envisioned, people upholding civic duties to leave a data legacy, we only need to see the precipitation gauges populating thousands of backyards across the United States.
In the other chapters of part 1 we will meet more citizen scientists who contribute to the scientific process through their hobbies. Naturalists are hobbyists who are familiar with nature and can identify animal and plant species. Knowledge of natural history is the foundation for all ecological, evolutionary, or conservation research. Despite its central importance, few scientists have natural history expertise. Museums have recognized the decline in professionals with the ability to curate and care for collections and carry out the science of taxonomy. Similarly, there is a decline in such expertise among the public: a wealth of natural history expertise is not getting passed down to up and coming generations. Children can recognize hundreds of corporate logos, but only a handful of local plants and animals. Compare the youth of today with those portrayed in old Hardy Boys books. Kids on iPhones bare little resemblance to the fictional Frank and Joe Hardy, who were outdoors and inquisitive every free hour. Their friend Chet Morton, the chubby farm boy who hid apples in his pockets for snacks, had a myriad of science-related hobbies including spelunking, skin diving, using microscopes, weather monitoring, and infrared photography. Today 20 percent of kids are obese and are occupied in electronic entertainment over seven hours per day. Less familiarity with natural history means less citizen science, and also less conservation. In his 1998 book The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, Robert Michael Pyle, who in 1974 founded the Xerces Society, a nonprofit organization that works toward the protection of wildlife, warned of the extinction of experience and its consequence for conservation. As he foresaw a future where kids spend more time online than outside, he pondered, “People who care conserve; people who don’t know don’t care. What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren?”
Ornithology, the topic of chapter 2, is a case in point where the experts in natural history are more often hobbyists rather than professionals. As professional ornithologists focus to become experts in one small area—say, hummingbird tongue and flower coevolution—birders spend their leisure becoming acquainted with the daily and seasonal habits of many bird species. These birdwatchers have enormous uncredentialed skills in identifying birds by sight and sound or by simply looking at the architecture of a nest or the color of eggs.