Occidental’s NWS weather watchers are the last of their kind in Sonoma County

In Ken and Luci Farr’s garden out in the hills on the west side of Occidental sits their rain gauge. It’s nothing fancy, just the standard 8-inch-diameter model installed by the National Weather Service in the yards of people all over the country, who, like the Farrs, have volunteered to work as formal reporting stations for the weather service.

And every day, just like clockwork, Ken, 76, is out there at 5 p.m., alongside the raised beds brimming with onions, turnips and beets, to pull the gauge’s measuring stick out of its 20-inch metal tube. He checks its reading, writes it down, and heads back inside the house he and Luci, 70, built by hand, up a flight of stairs and over to his desk to send the reading off to the weather service, as well as the low and high temperatures.

Ken and Luci are part of the NWS Cooperative Observer Program - and in Sonoma County, they’re the last of their kind.

While the weather service still gets daily weather records from stations in Venado, Fort Ross and the airports in Petaluma and Santa Rosa, and monthly reports from stations in the Geysers and Sebastopol, Ken and Luci are the last individuals doing it. The remainder are either automatically reported, as in Venado, or recorded by institutions, like the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport.

The number of private individuals participating in the cooperative observer program has dwindled over the years. When Bob Benjamin, program leader for the NWS San Francisco/Monterey Bay Area office, first started working with observers in the mid-1990s, there were about six in Sonoma County.

When the Farrs took over as the official Occidental station in 1997, Benjamin’s the one who headed out to their Joy Road home to set up the rain gauge.

“Finding people who can do it is not easy,” Benjamin said. “Everybody’s just gotten busier, for one thing, and there is a particular commitment. To have a good record, you have to have a daily reading at about the same time. So for farmers, or for people who were sort of glued to the land, it wasn’t a huge problem to say, ‘Every morning at 6 a.m., I’ll take my daily reading.’”

With so much automation being used in farming and other industries, people are more mobile now.

“They aren’t staying attached to their property,” he said.

Staying attached to their property isn’t a problem for the Farrs, who, after spending their working years as teachers in Alaska’s bush country, are mostly self-sufficient and only head into town from their “Farr Eden” homestead occasionally.

Their summer property in Anderson, Alaska - far less rural than where they spent their teaching years - is called “Farr North,” and when they’re there, a neighbor takes over the 5 p.m. weather reporting duty for Ken.

His interest in the weather, and his service as a record keeper for the NWS, started while they were living in Alaska in 1981. He would report weather conditions for pilots landing near where they lived in English Bay, a village now called Nanwalek, with a population of less than 200.

When the Farrs moved to their property in Occidental in 1987, the habit stuck. Back then, a neighbor was the official observer for Occidental, so they just did it for fun, keeping track of the weather with their son Sean, now 38. But when the neighbor decided she was no longer up to it, the Farrs took over.

“I think that we need in society to give back any way we can, and this is a service that is important,” Luci said.

For Ken, though, it’s more than that. “Taking the weather every day is a reminder to be more in the moment,” he said.

This year’s torrential rainfall has pushed Santa Rosa’s precipitation total into second place, according to NWS records, with 55.25 of rain falling since Oct. 1. As far as the weather service is concerned, Santa Rosa is just 0.43 inches away from shattering a record in place since 1983, when 55.68 inches fell in Santa Rosa from October to September. Rain is expected to return Sunday into early Monday morning, which could edge Santa Rosa into first-place territory, with sun expected to follow.

But records are tricky business, with the official Santa Rosa weather station having moved over the years, and regulations guiding placement and proper measuring procedures changing over time, too. Because of that, the official NWS records for Santa Rosa only date back to the 1902-1903 rain year, when 28.75 inches of rain fell in Santa Rosa from July to June. That’s before another change in record-keeping happened. The weather service now considers Oct. 1 to be the official start of the rain year, further complicating rainfall tracking.

A number of Bay Area weather watchers, including Art Hayssen, a meteorology instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College who’s been tracking Sonoma County weather for about 50 years, point back to what they say was an even wetter year than anything the weather service has on record: 1889-1890, when 56.06 inches of rain fell in Santa Rosa from July to June. But even that measurement is in dispute, as another weather watcher claimed it was 56.07 inches.

That, said Benjamin, is why having observers continually tracking conditions over a period of 20 to 30 years, like Ken and Luci have in Occidental, is so climatologically valuable. The cooperative observer program has been in place since 1890, with the passage of the Organic Act, which formalized weather reporting. The data collected has been used not only for agricultural and city planning purposes, but also to track human impact on climate.

“It takes a lot of time, so as we start to lose some of these stations that have a long period of history, it’s not going to be easy to replace them,” Benjamin said. “To the detriment of the climate data.”

You can reach Staff Writer Christi Warren at 707-521-5205 or christi.warren@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @SeaWarren.