Where to find rainfall amounts

Where would one go to find recent rainfall totals for a city?

I’m trying to find out how much rain Yuma, AZ has gotten since last night, but everything I’ve tried comes up with N/A.

How about wunderground ? http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KNYL/2004/10/20/DailyHistory.html

Thanks.

http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/KNYL.html

Just change the Kxxx to whatever METAR is closest.

Sometimes they don’t show the rain amounts though…

http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/KFFZ.html

Says light rain, but doesn’t provide any totals. The date change bar doesn’t appear to work either.

[quote author=krelvinaz link=topic=5849.msg38437#msg38437 date=1098402991]
Sometimes they don’t show the rain amounts though…

http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/KFFZ.html

Says light rain, but doesn’t provide any totals.

Try this link to the NWS office in Phoenix http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=psr then select “Regional Summary (RTP)”

Blast from the past… :slight_smile:

Thanks for the info…

I’d found it back when I original posted it.

Another blast from the past…quick METAR lesson…

You can find hourly, 3-hourly, 6-hourly, and 24-hourly precip totals in the raw METARs. It hasn’t rained in Yuma lately so I’ll use Albany, NY (ALB) as an example. Hourly rainfall is reported every hour that rain is detected. They are coded by Pxxxx where P0001 is 0.01" of rain, P0025 is 0.25" of rain, and P0000 is a trace of rain. 3-hourly rainfall is reported at 3z, 9z, 15z, and 21z. 6-hourly rainfall is reported 0z, 6z, 12z, and 18z. 24-hour rainfall is reported 12z.

Here we go…text in BOLD is what I added…

METAR KALB 150551Z 00000KT 7SM -RA FEW038 SCT075 OVC090 16/14 A2971 RMK AO2 RAE19B37 SLP060 P0000 60019 T01560144 10211 20156 58005 - P0000 = a trace past hour ; 60019 = 0.19" in the last 6 hours
METAR KALB 150651Z 17006KT 7SM -RA BKN034 OVC100 16/14 A2970 RMK AO2 SLP057 P0004 T01610139 - 0.04" past hour
METAR KALB 150751Z 19007KT 7SM BKN095 16/15 A2969 RMK AO2 RAE47 SLP053 P0002 T01610150 - 0.02" past hour
METAR KALB 150851Z 19008KT 8SM OVC100 17/15 A2969 RMK AO2 SLP054 60006 T01670150 55006 - no rain past hour ; 60006 = 0.06" last 3 hours (the hourlies over the last 3 hours add up)
METAR KALB 150951Z 21004KT 6SM -RA BR BKN038 BKN055 OVC090 16/16 A2971 RMK AO2 RAB10 SLP061 P0000 T01610156 - trace past hour
METAR KALB 151051Z 16005KT 5SM -RA BR OVC034 17/16 A2972 RMK AO2 SLP063 P0002 T01670156 - 0.02" past hour
METAR KALB 151151Z 18007KT 3SM RA BR FEW017 OVC038 17/16 A2973 RMK AO2 SLP066 P0006 60014 70033 T01670156 10167 20156 51013 - 0.06" past hour ; 60014 = 0.14" past 6 hours ; 70033 = 0.33" past 24 hours

Hope this helps for the future. Here you can find the last 24 hours of raw METARs for Yuma (YUM).

http://www.uswx.com/us/stn/?code=c&n=24&stn=KYUM

Station name and the amount of obs displayed can be changed.

You can find the info in some METARs but I’ve not seen many METARs that publish rainfall info. Also to get rainfall totals you’d have to be really sure of picking up METARs often enough to not lose any data.

Chris,

All of the ASOS stations out here, and most of the AWOS ones, report precip this way. Unless a station malfunctions they all automatically report regularly. I can’t say I’ve checked many of the UK obs, but if they’re anything like I’ve seen out of Canada then I know what you mean. Here in the States we even have the temp/dew reported in tenths of a degree Celcius so that there is an accurate conversion to whole degrees Fahrenheit.

I wonder if it’s a US-only METAR addition? There are differences in format between the US and (I think) the rest of the world. I’ve never seen a UK station report rain and I can’t say I’ve seen a definition of the METAR format that includes the PNNNN description for rain. I’m not an expert on METAR formats though!

It has definitely been adjusted for the US. We’re obviously still reluctant to switch to metric units so our METARs are a metric-english hybrid. Compare EGKK in London and BOS in Boston, MA…

METAR EGKK 171150Z 02005KT 290V140 9999 SCT048 BKN070 10/M01 Q1020

METAR KBOS 171154Z 29005KT 8SM BKN070 12/08 A3008 RMK AO2 SLP186 T01170078 10122 20100 51016

Both wind speeds are in knots, but the US METARs report visibility in statute miles…I believe others around the world are km. We report altimeter with an “A” and in inches of mercury while others are with a “Q” and in mb/hpa. We do have sea level pressure reported in mb/hpa in the RMK (remark) section and is reported in tenths. SLP186 in this case is 1018.6mb. The 12/08 in the body of the report is temp/dew in

Do you know of a site that defines all the options for US METARs?

Don’t know how current this is but it’s fairly informative

http://www.alaska.faa.gov/fai/afss/metar%20taf/sametara.htm

Unfortunately that doesn’t define how the additional automated data, e.g. hourly rainfall, are included in the METAR. The table at the end of the page mentions the additional information but not how it’s coded.

Maybe this contains what your looking for…

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/oso/oso1/oso12/fmh1.htm

It does. Thanks for the link…it’s the best description of a METAR I’ve seen to date :smiley:

Sorry if this is totally off the wall, but don’t they have XML available now and wouldn’t that be better defined?

Unless they’ve changed the format recently, the XML version doesn’t have any additional info like rainfall in it.

Also the data is provided as one XML file per METAR which makes it horribly inefficient for the purpose I want the data for. XML is also very verbose by comparison to a straight METAR. A single line METAR of perhaps 60 characters turns into a beast of 20-30 lines of 60 characters!