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RAIN (AND SNOW) MAN Yorkville resident tracks rain, snowfall as observer for National Weather Service By MATT SCHURY mschury@kendallcountynow.com
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hen it rains, it pours, and if you’re a National Weather Service Cooperative Observer like Gary Gruhlke you always know exactly how much precipitation we’ve had. Once a day Gruhlke measures the amount rain or snow that has fallen and reports the data electronically to the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). He became involved in the NWS program shortly after he moved to Kendall County about 15 years ago and attended a NWS open house in downtown Aurora. He received a call about a week later from a hydrologist for the agency’s Chicago office asking if he wanted to be an observer. Soon the NWS installed a rain gauge in his backyard and he has been at it ever since. “There has been a rain gauge in my backyard now for almost 15 years,” he said. “Every day I go online and submit if we had any rain or not – there’s also snow that gets measured, too.” Gruhlke majored in meteorology at Northern Illinois University in the 1970s before getting sick his junior year and transferring to Triton College in River Grove. He took a different career path and graduated with a food service degree but always maintained a passion for the weather. He said becoming an observer is a way for him to pursue his passion as a hobby. According to the NWS website, the co-op was formed in 1890 and has over 8,700 volunteers that take observations “on farms, in urban and suburban areas, National Parks, seashores, and mountaintops.” Gruhlke is the only observer in Kendall County out of about 35 in the entire Chicago region. “I’ve always had a passion for weather since I was about 10 years old,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun to do and you have to stay on top of it,” After a rain or snow event, Gruhlke says he checks the rain gauge and reports the amount of precipitation. The rain gauge has a metal exterior with a plastic
Eric Miller - emiller@shawmedia.com
Gary Gruhlke has been a weather observer in Kendal County for the last 12 years. He takes rain and snow measurements from his backyard in Kendall County for the National Weather Service. funnel and tube that collects the rain or snow. “This thing is made out of boilerplate – it’s really heavy,” he said. The hardest thing to measure is blowing snow, according to Gruhlke. “You have a board that is about 9 by 12 and measure what falls on top of it,” he said. “There’s two parts to that – you have to measure the snow itself and the water equivalent in the snow. It runs about 10 to 12 inches of snow per inch of moisture on a normal snow. That’s the fluffy stuff – that’s 20 to one.” The NWS cares more about the amount of water in the snow because normally the ground is saturated come spring and then there is flooding once the
snow starts melting. “This year the ground didn’t freeze that much,” Gruhlke said. “This was an abnormal year.” According to Gruhlke’s data, less than 19 inches of snow fell this winter in Kendall County, compared to 2014 when 50 inches of snow fell. Gruhlke, who is now retired, said when he would travel for work his son, Kevin, would take over observation duties, reporting how much rain or snow fell. He noted the technology for observing the weather has come far since he studied meteorology in college in the 1970s. “There wasn’t any radar, all you had was a teletype machine and a facsimile
machine,” he said, adding, “All the weather sites were still manually done and every hour someone went out and did all the measurements.” Today, he said, there is pinpoint accurate radar and over 80 weather models that meteorologists use. “It’s like night and day,” he said. “As we keep these models going it should get more and more accurate as we go along.” He said the forecasts today are pretty accurate even three days out. “Just listen to what they predict,” he said. “If they tell you it’s going to rain at this time, it’s going to rain at this time, if it’s going to hail it’s going to hail – if
See WEATHER OBSERVER, page 5