Weather Intelligence Plus - Not so much

So here in Central California, we had our first rain in about a month (thankfully clearing the sky from a lot of bad air!) on Wednesday. But digging into my Zone settings, there was no precipitation shown for Wednesday, only a little for Thursday (the storm continued into the early morning Thursday). By various reports, and my personal observation, the storm delivered ~ 2/3 of an inch of rainfall.
Is my WI+ just not working? This was a huge feature that I expected to work, because our weather differs greatly from the official Fresno Weather Station at the airport. There are a number of PWS’s within a couple miles from my house, is it possible that none of them are recording rainfall?
None of my zones are going to be affected this week by failing to record the precipitation, but it does throw off the accuracy of the Soil Moisture in all my zones.
How do I troubleshoot this issue? Thanks.

WI+ uses interpolated data for a set of geo coordinates. That data is not guaranteed to be as accurate as a station close by to you, but you don’t have to worry about it being “offline” or wildly inaccurate. I always recommend if you want more timely, accurate data to choose a PWS that is close by and that you trust or have verified the data. In your case it looks like you have quite a few that are within a mile from your residence. You can also click on the stations nearby and see if they did indeed report the precipitation that you feel like was experienced.

Hope this helps.

:cheers:

When I look at the various PWS near me on WU, most of them have posted rainfall for 11/21. So if WI+ is supposed to aggregate the nearby stations, and interpolate the data for my location, why do I show 0 rainfall for that day? Shouldn’t there be at least some precipitation calculated?

Can you send me some examples? The best I can do is forward this to our weather service provider and ask them how that data was missed. Thanks and have a great week.

:cheers:

Here are 4 nearby PWS to my home (data from WU). Three show precipitation on Wednesday, one doesn’t show any information (that one is possibly the closest to my house).
My understanding was that WI+ was supposed to aggregate the data to provide hyper local information. But if it’s letting one station override the remaining ones, then I need to link to a single PWS with reliable information. But because the most reliable isn’t the closest, either way it’s not really accurate.

Can you provide the URLs to those stations? Ill forward along to our weather provider for review. Thanks!

:cheers:

I don’t know how to find the URL’s for the stations, I just found their information through the WU app.

That Dominion station with 0 in could be throwing things off with the interpolation if it is closer to you. Anyway, the precip history for Rachio will not permantly save until after a few days so feel free to change to a weather station that makes the most sense for your location (probably not the Dominion station!). You’ve got plenty of stations to choose from in a nice big urban area so Weather Intelligence+ may not be the best tool for the job.

1 Like