How to become a Long Island weather watcher

Like clockwork, each morning at 7, Barry Dlouhy checks the amount of precipitation in the rain gauge he hung along the canal behind his Bay Shore home.

He’s been sending rain data for 10 years to the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, a Colorado-based nonprofit that has blanketed the country with volunteer weather watchers to gather information, used by researchers, emergency managers, insurance adjusters, teachers and weather enthusiasts.

“It’s rewarding,” said Dlouhy, 75, a retired high school English teacher. “You become more aware of everything around you because you’re observing the precipitation.”

A volunteer army of daily weather watchers has been looking up at the skies and amplifying the ground reach of meteorologists at the community collaborative and other outfits, from the National Weather Service to CBS New York’s First Alert Weather Watchers program. Many volunteers are trained and equipped with simple devices to record temperature, rain, snow and sometimes hail, usually just once a day at a designated time.

By all accounts, anyone can do it, including children.

These spotters are indispensable at filling in the gaps of what’s going on across Long Island and helping paint a long-term picture of the climate, said Bryan Ramsey, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Upton.

“If we’re forecasting three inches of snow for the North Fork of Long Island and they end up getting eight inches, that’s good to know because we’re able to better tune our forecast in the future based on what we did right and what we did wrong,” he said.

Joseph Pollina, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Upton who runs Long Island’s cooperative program and trains weather watchers, said volunteers should be willing to commit to submitting data for years from the same location.

“What we’re trying to do is build a climatology at these specific sites,” he said.

The NWS’ Cooperative Program has 8,000-plus spotters, with the Upton office often focusing on recruiting in areas that have no volunteers. Observers in its SKYWARN network are trained in hazardous weather, such as signs of developing, mature and dissipating thunderstorms, according to the weather service. “Spotters provide ground truth on the atmosphere that we observe from radar, satellites and various reporting stations,” its website states.

For Dlouhy, the retirement gig has turned into a continuing education.

“It’s extremely easy,” he said. “I’m not on call 24 hours a day."