VMS opportunity: CoCoRaHS
CoCoRaHs is a citizen science program for reporting precipitation data. See: http://www.cocorahs.org/ for the full story. The data is helpful in improving weather models, and it provides more data on the extent of flooding or droughts than the data from “official” weather stations.
The program requires a special rain gauge. The CoCoRaHs program has a weather instrument supplier which will sell them for around $22 plus S&H. If you want to participate you can join at the web site and order your own gauge. There is an online training program, which tells you how to read a rain gauge in 100ths of an inch and how to place the gauge so that it collects the rain with minimal error. It does require routine data entry, but it only takes a few seconds to enter the data. Go to: CoCoRaHS and click on the county where data is collected.