“I didn’t sign up to try to measure a new record or anything”, said Matt Carnicle, a volunteer for the NASA-sponsored Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network, or CoCoRaHS, project. Carnicle measured a whopping 29.06 inches of rainfall on June 18th, 2026, breaking an all-time 24-hour record for the state of Louisiana of 22.00 inches. “I’m just a regular guy who likes to track the weather, and I report what I get in my gauge whether it’s zero, two hundredths, or whatever is in there when I read it.” 

CoCoRaHS  (pronounced KO-ko-rozz) is a network of volunteer weather observers of all ages working together to measure and map rain, hail, and snow by measuring precipitation in their backyards. Together, these thousands of daily precipitation reports – openly available on the project website – are used by scientists and citizens for a wide variety of purposes, to include improving weather forecasting, informing water and land management, driving atmospheric models, and triggering flash flood and severe weather warnings. 

Matt joined through a storm-spotter class where he learned how CoCoRaHS is part of a NASA hail research project focused on Gulf States in the Southeast United States. CoCoRaHS reports (and photos) of hail are used for researching the “melt rate” between when the satellite estimates the stone sizes in the clouds and what volunteers measure on the ground. Matt took it a step further and purchased a standardized rain gauge in order to participate with CoCoRaHS by measuring rainfall.

Matt’s June 18, 2026 rain measurement shatters Louisiana’s 1962 state record of 22.00 inches of rain in 24-hours (Hawaii holds the national record with 49.69 inches in 24-hours). Even more remarkably, the 29.06 inches he measured fell in less than 12 hours! According to Louisiana State Climatologist Jay Grymes, who validated Matt’s measurement along with National Weather Service representatives, an event of this magnitude in this area is expected to happen less than once in a thousand years. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) committee will convene in the coming months to verify and document the new record.

You can join Matt and other CoCoRaHS volunteers and submit official rainfall reports to the National Weather Service. They’re also on the lookout for hail in the southeast, where CoCoRaHS and NASA are doing research on how hail melts as it moves from the clouds to the ground. The only requirement for participation is that volunteers use the correct manual gauge, which is precise to the nearest 1/100th of an inch and is approved by the National Weather Service (measurements from automated rain gauges are not accepted). Sign up here, and you might measure the next record precipitation event: https://science.nasa.gov/citizen-science/community-collaborative-rain-hail-and-snow-network/

Learn More and Get Involved

Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS)

Join a national community of precipitation reporters providing critical data to improve scientific understanding and forecasts.

The Zooniverse, a NASA grantee that runs the world’s largest platform for online people-powered research, has reached an extraordinary milestone: 1 billion classifications contributed by volunteers around the world. This milestone is a celebration of everyone who has marked a dip in a light curve, confirmed the presence of a moving object in a short video, or identified species in a camera trap image. Each of these small contributions collectively advances our understanding of the universe.

A total of 31 NASA-sponsored citizen science projects have been hosted on Zooniverse, accounting for 120 million classifications by 324 thousand volunteers since 2020. Through projects like Planet Hunters TESS, Daily Minor Planet, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, Space Umbrella, and Snapshot Wisconsin, volunteers help discover exoplanets, identify near-Earth objects and asteroids, search for brown dwarfs and planetary systems, analyze effects of the solar wind, and inform wildlife management decisions. These projects have led to 96 scientific publications, and 56 of these articles feature NASA citizen scientists as co-authors to recognize the significance of their research contributions. These efforts demonstrate how public participation can accelerate discovery by combining human curiosity and pattern recognition with data from NASA missions and observatories. Collaboration between volunteers, scientists, and computing technology will be even more important in the future as we tackle enormous and complex datasets, like those from NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. 

“One billion classifications represent far more than a number; it’s one billion moments of curiosity transformed into meaningful contributions to research,” said Laura Trouille, principal investigator of Zooniverse and vice president of Science Engagement at the Adler Planetarium. “Every classification on Zooniverse brings us one step closer to new discoveries and a deeper understanding of our universe, our world, and ourselves.” 

Zooniverse is the world’s largest platform for people-powered research. Co-founded by the Adler Planetarium and the University of Oxford, with the University of Minnesota serving as a key institutional partner, Zooniverse enables anyone, anywhere to contribute directly to real scientific research. Through its six-year collaboration with NASA, Zooniverse provides science-enabling infrastructure to NASA researchers through tools and a community of more than 3 million registered volunteers.