Using soil moisture and rain/snowfall data, Peter Callen has come up with a system of rating each month's overall relative wetness/dryness on a scale from -2 to +2. In this presentation from the 2022 AMS Weather Band Community and Citizen Science Symposium, Peter details how the months are added up for each year, and how he creates charts shows the monthly and yearly changes for the past 10 years.
Peter Callen has been a regular CoCoRAHS participant for over 11 years now with over 4,000 daily observations. He has lived in the West his whole life of 59 years, so far... including CA, CO and the past 20+ years in NM. A life long gardener, orchard keeper and skilled laborer of many stripes, he is currently doing contract work with the City of Albuquerque to turn degraded farmland into high quality wildlife habitat. Years of firefighting in CA have permanently tuned his awareness to the weather and how it has been changing in his lifetime.