The API currently contains four fields regarding precipitation:
- Rain Accumulated in the previous 60 seconds
- Local Daily Rain Accumulation (total since midnight)
- Rain Accumulated Final (Rain Check) in the previous 60 seconds
- Local Daily Rain Accumulation Final (Rain Check; total since midnight)
Until recently, the first two fields in the list above allowed developers to access the raw rain data recorded by a Tempest (or Sky sensor), while the second two fields allowed developers to access processed RainCheck data. Recently it appears that a change has been made to the API such that all these four fields only show processed RainCheck data.
@eric, please could you ask the Tempest developers to confirm whether this change was intentional, and whether there is any intention to continue to expose raw rainfall data to developers? In the Tempest app and website you still have the ability to toggle RainCheck display on and off (which suggest the raw rain data is stored on the Tempest servers), but there appears to be no way to currently access this data through the publicly accessible API.
Exposing only RainCheck data through the API does create issues for integrations (such as weewx) that track rain accumulation. RainCheck is a post-processing feature, but many integrations work in real time and do not expect to have to correct previous accumulation values. As a result, the total rain accumulation calculated through integrations doesn’t match either the raw rain value or the Rain Check value provided by Tempest.