Advancing Water Resources Research and Management

Symposium on Water Resources and the World Wide Web
Seattle, Washington, December 5-9, 1999

24h data, further information

Individual cooperative observers are recruited and overseen by NWS personnel. Ordinarily they use standard 8-inch NWS gages and report their observations to one of a few centralized locations via telephone and/or keypad. From these locations the individual NWS Weather Forecast Offices receive reports, and pass them on to the RFCs. Many of these observers report only non zero precipitation, so that there will often be more gage reports on rainy days. However, on clear days non reports are not assumed to be zero precipitation. Although observers are requested to report at 12 UTC, factors such as heavy rain or absence from home at observing times can produce some readings that are not perfectly timed.

Regarding an example of quality control procedures, at the ABRFC (the Arkansas-Red Basin River Forecast Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma) the list of gage sites that pass their QC procedures are published daily on the web, and only stations deemed adequate are included in the data stream that NCEP (and subsequently FSL) receives (personal communication from Bill Lawrence). This station list is available at http://info.abrfc.noaa.gov/pub/PointPrecip/

The 24 hour HADS totals reported to NCEP should match the daily totals of the hourly data generated at FSL. But differences occasionally arise, due to slightly different ways of handling questionable, missing or late data.

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