Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and Saskatchewan. There were over 20,000 participants as of March 2015. Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, or CoCoRaHS, is a network of volunteer weather observers in the United States, Canada, and the Bahamas that take daily readings of precipitation and report them to a central data store over the internet. The network was started in 1997, in Larimer County, Colorado after a flash flood in Spring Creek killed five people and
NEXRAD tornado detection and subsequent warnings. WSR-88D sites across the nation have been upgraded to polarimetric radar, which adds a vertical polarization to the traditional horizontally polarized radar waves, in order to more accurately discern what is reflecting the signal. This so-called dual polarization allows the radar to distinguish between rain, hail, and snow, something the horizontally polarized radars cannot accurately do. Early trials showed that rain, ice pellets, snow, hail, birds, insects, and ground clutter all have different signatures with dual polarization, which could mark a significant improvement in forecasting winter storms and severe thunderstorms. The deployment of the dual