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

CoCoRaHS (pronounced KO-ko-rozz) is a network of volunteer weather observers of all ages who work 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, including improving weather forecasting, informing water and land management, driving atmospheric models, and triggering flash floods and severe weather warnings.

Matt joined through a storm observing class where he learned how CoCoRaHS is part of a NASA hail research project focused on the Gulf states in the southeastern United States. CoCoRaHS hail reports (and photographs) are used to investigate the “melt rate” between when the satellite estimates the size of stones in the clouds and what volunteers measure on the ground. Matt went a step further and purchased a standardized rain gauge so he could participate with CoCoRaHS by measuring rainfall.

Matt’s June 18, 2026 rainfall measurement breaks the 1962 Louisiana 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 surprising is that 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 representatives from the National Weather Service, an event of this magnitude in this area is expected to occur less than once every thousand years. A committee from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will meet in the coming months to verify and document the new record.

You can join Matt and other CoCoRaHS volunteers and submit official rain reports to the National Weather Service. They’re also keeping an eye on hail in the Southeast, where CoCoRaHS and NASA are investigating how hail melts as it passes from the clouds to the ground. The only requirement to participate is that volunteers use the correct manual rain gauge, which is accurate to the nearest 1/100th of an inch and is approved by the National Weather Service (measurements from automatic rain gauges are not accepted). Register here and you can measure the next record precipitation event: https://science.nasa.gov/citizen-science/community-collaborative-rain-hail-and-snow-network/