With NearCast Rain should we be seeing a snow water equivalent added to our Tempest precipitation totals? If so I’m not seeing it. Since NearCast Rain uses things like CoCoRaHS reports which I’m part of, other tipping buckets, radar estimates, NASA analyses, and more then in theory rain check should be able to report snow water equivalent.
Nope! Rain Check is only a liquid precipitation estimate.
CoCoRaHS, heated tipping buckets, radar estimates, and more do all report melted liquid precipitation so it should be easy to add. I think Weather Flow is leaving out valuable information by not adding melted snow to NearCast Rain.
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Thanks for your feedback, sounds like a great feature request to me! Feel free to post your suggestion in the Feature Requests category!
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I edited it to be included in the feature request category.
I’m not sure what Rain Check is, but I am all for being able to report snow totals on my Tempest. I added a vote for this feature.
- Edited my posts to remove RainCheck and replace with NearCast Rain.
Thanks for the vote. More about RainCheck at Introducing RainCheck
It is now called NearCast Rain. More info here: https://help.weatherflow.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024436634-NC-Rain-NearCast-Rain-
Looking at the raw UDP data that comes off the Tempest I can see some registrations of snow hitting the sensor. I was playing around with the data last winter and I had a head scratcher when I saw the activity. I wonder how easily it can be translated.
I didn’t realize RainCheck had been changed to NearCast Rain. I edited my posts to reflect the correct name.
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So let me make sure I am understanding this request correctly; are you asking for a snow tracking (based off moisture) setting in Tempest similar to what we have with rain? Would this setting be able to accurately depict how much snow we’ve received at our station?
Not exactly. What I’m asking for is to have our Tempest stations that have NearCast Rain turned on to use the liquid content of frozen precipitation in addition to liquid precipitation reflected in the report. Right now NearCast Rain only uses the rain reports from CoCoRaHS, other tipping buckets, radar estimates, NASA analyses, and more to estimate NearCast precipitation leaving out the liquid content of frozen precipitation. CoCoRaHS is one example, all reports include the liquid content of the frozen precipitation in the report.
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Ok, I see. Good to know. I was hoping this somehow could play a role in measuring the amount of snow received at the station, but it doesn’t appear to be so. To me, that would be one of the best features of the Tempest station. I’m just not sure it’s possible.
With NearCast Rain it would definitely seem possible to estimate the amount of snow/frozen precipitation that has fallen at each individual Tempest station considering all of the information that is ingested unless something has changed from when it was called RainCheck. With RainCheck things like CoCoRaHS reports, other tipping buckets, radar estimates, NASA analyses, and more was used to estimate the amount of precipitation that has fallen over each Tempest station, I assume it is the same for NearCast? @WFstaff @WFsupport @WeatherFlowTeam can you confirm what data is used for the NearCast product?
NC Rain (formerly called RainCheck) values are a Tempest System product. The data provided is influenced by the measurements from your Tempest device and also other measures of precipitation such as radar derived precipitation products, nearby professional rain gauges and other nearby Tempest devices.
Does NC Rain still use CoCoRaHS data as well?
No, it does not. While crowd-sourced data from the general public is great, the timing of reports from CoCoRaHS is once per day. Reports are not provided at consistent times by each and every volunteer, day in and day out. The data from CoCoRaHS reports requires heavy QC, and has other caveats in addition to the latency.
NC Rain updates much more frequently, as often as every 15 minutes, pushing to near real time updates.
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Good to know NC Rain does not use CoCoRaHS data like RainCheck did.
What sources of data does NC Rain use?
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