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National Weather Service employee Ashley Novak recognizes Celina's Dennis and Theresa Howick for 20 years of service with the Cooperative Observing Program on Wednesday morning.
CELINA - The National Weather Service (NWS) on Wednesday presented an award to Dennis and Theresa Howick of Celina for providing temperature and precipitation observations for over 20 years.
The couple's volunteer work on behalf of NWS' Cooperative Observing Program, a national weather and climate observation network, plays a critical role in contributing to the knowledge and understanding of local, national and global climate, according to an NWS news release.
This radiation shroud that contains an air temperature sensor.
More than 8,700 volunteers take observations on farms, in urban and suburban areas, national parks, seashores and mountaintops. The data provided helps to verify warnings about high winds, heavy rain, extreme heat and severe cold.
Observation program leader James Gibson said he oversees 73 volunteers, including Dennis and Theresa Howick. Volunteers take daily weather measurements in 52 counties throughout Northern Kentucky, Eastern Indiana and Western Ohio.
"We use it for climatology and daily operations," Gibson said. "In the weather world, we can kind of have an idea of how much rain they had, what the highs and lows are, but we need people on the ground actually getting the truth, so that's what they're for."
In addition to NWS, Dennis and Theresa observe the weather for The Daily Standard six days a week.
Precipitation is measured in this rain gauge at the Howick's farm near Celina.
After his father, Harold Howick, a farmer, retired in 2000, Dennis took over. He said farming and weather go hand-in-hand.
"It's always been interesting," Dennis said. "There have been new people to work with. My wife and I, when we got married, she became way more weather knowledgeable as well."
Theresa helps transfer Dennis' numbers to the monthly sheet and enters them online. Theresa said they previously had to mail the statistics to the NWS by the sixth of each month.
"I was told early on that my handwriting was a lot better than my father-in-law's," she said. "When I was in the Navy, I wanted to be a weather observer, but I got side-tracked. When this happened it was kind of like happenstance."
Theresa said the Howick family has about 67 years of weather data at the family home.
"If you ever want to know what the weather was like the day you were born, we can give you temperatures, and if there was any precipitation," she said.
While they have no children together, Theresa said she and Dennis may be able to talk a nephew or one of her two sons into carrying on the Howick family tradition.
A citation awarded to Dennis Howick's father Harold for his local weather observations.
Harold was also honored by the NWS in 1996 for 40 years of service with the Cooperative Observing Program. He had signed up after seeing an ad in a July 1956 Sunday newspaper. A year later, his son Dennis was born.
Dennis, 65, fondly recalled memories of helping his dad check the weather after school.
"In the rain gauge, there holds 2 inches of rain in the center tube and then it spills over," he explained. "We came home from school and we'd had a big storm. Dad had come out and got a picture of it. It was the first time that the tube had spilled over."
