I was playing with the settings of my newly installed gen. 3 Rachio, since I don’t have my own PWS I was really glad to have the support of Weather Intelligence Plus (WI+), but I noticed that with that feature on the weather data was somewhat wrong.
I live in Bolzano, 39100, Italy (46.495749, 11.344138) and, for example, a couple of days ago we had a light local thunderstorm at night, but the controller was still reporting clear skies and 0.0 precipitation. So I checked my location on AerisWeather, which I understood is your data provider and that was listing the aforementioned values, that are wrong. Then I checked the local PWS listed on the map, I can only see 4 of them, but there should be more (is there a cap on searching distance?). Anyway, the nearest one was listing “–” precipitation, I think the sensor is broken/off, the other 2 are always reporting “0.0” precipitation (covered terrace maybe), while the last one was registering some data, which I assume was correct. What I suppose is happening, please correct me if I’m wrong, is that WI+ is interpolating the precipitation value between 0.0 of Aeris, the three zeros of the stations and the only correctly registered value of the last PWS, so that the total result is still 0.0 and this could interfere with water scheduling, since I’m using Flex Daily.
Currently I let the device work by getting the data from that single station, but that sensor is located under heavy mountain shadows so the climate is really off with respect to where my garden is (esp. humidity and temp). I would really like to use WI+ instead, does it have a learning curve and should I let it adjust itself? Or can I do something else?
Thanks for letting us know. For WI+, we rely on IBM. You are correct in that we the interpolated data is between multiple stations and if they are all reporting 0, then you would see 0 precipitation as well.
You are only getting 4 stations back because the other stations that are closest to you are not reporting data, therefore we aren’t listing them. We are investigating if we can get more stations back to you and make sure that those are reliable.
If you’re using IBM that means that the forecast is the one I’m seeing on weather.com right? This is good news because this one should be spot on!
If the interpolation is done by weighting based on distance my case is one of the worst because the nearest stations are the ones not reporting data or false data. Even if you are doing some clustering and validation it would be difficult where the only correct data is the output from the single outlier in the group, having the other 2 stations would be better.
I tried to go on wunderground wundermap, where I can see them and it seems they are reporting data correctly, also this one I think is the official municipality’s (I asked them and waiting for an official reply): https://www.wunderground.com/weather/pws%3AITACOLOG5
so that would be golden!
By the way, today I tried to set the device back to WI+ and currently it seems to report the right data both forecast and precipitation in the zones. Is the precipitation history saved in your cloud or is it maybe really getting something right now?
Weather Underground is the source for data for IBM.
The interpolated data is done by a rating system and a variety of factors, one of which being distance in addition to reliability and accuracy based on other stations too. Depending on what stations are being used for the interpolated data, it may not be as accurate choosing a specific station.
We wait to persist weather data until it is more stable. We do that in hopes to help provide more accurate waterings as to when should Rachio water.
I’m doing some tests, yesterday afternoon was raining, but I’m still having 0.0 precipitation with WI+, it really would be helpful to get data from the other 2 stations (they are between 1 and 2 miles away, I can provide the link if needed).
Also, I noticed that on the device forecast something was not right, for example, all stations were reporting a precipitation chance between 45% and 65%, while my rachio is almost always fixed at 9% every day (and sometimes below).
