Weather Intelligence Plus missed some rare rain

I was curious as to why Weather Intelligence Plus missed some local rain. A bunch of the WU weather stations in my neighborhood picked up anywhere from 0.3-0.9 inches, but the observed was only 0.1 inches so I didn’t get a skip. The local retention basin was flooded so I know a fair amount fell overnight. The closest PWS shows 0.71in. Any thoughts ?

@azdavidr I checked the interpolated precip data and it’s even lower now (.03 inches). I was going to say it was the interpolated “lag” but doesn’t look like it. Most precipitation was this morning. I’ll followup with our weather provider on Monday to see if they can determine the discrepancy.

If you know of a accurate, generally online PWS close to you I personally usually recommend that over the interpolated data which can never be as accurate. Interpolated gives you the peace of mind of a station not being online but the drawback is data that won’t exactly match closeby stations. The system will fall back to interpolated data if a station is unavailable so there really isn’t much of a penalty, unless it is reporting erroneous data.

:cheers:

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I’m wondering if you ever heard back on this @franz ?

@azdavidr Sorry forgot to post this. Mostly reaffirms a known, close-by PWS is always going to be your most accurate choice.

:cheers:

Our dev teams were able to confirm the data in the /precip/summary endpoint was matching what we received from the source. This endpoint is currently setup to retrieve the most recent data available via radar and observations in order to have the latest data available as fast as possible. With the current setup we are not ingesting data that may come in later. Some stations may report their rain totals later in the day which can change the totals for an area - this was exactly the case with the examples you provided. We will begin backfilling data that will include observations which come in later. We hope to have this available in the precip/summary endpoint within the next couple weeks as it should improve the totals.

Hopefully rolling out the self healing PWS feature soon :wink: It will automatically detect offline stations (or closer distance) and modify your station appropriately.

:cheers:

Ok, thanks. I’ve stayed away from using a PWS as I don’t trust the ones around for being accurate for anything than rain, but since you mentioned that’s all you use it for I’ll have to give it a shot. Thanks again.

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