Rain Check and Tempest

Tempest Owners
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1

I am getting notifications of short period rain under blue skies. I suspect birds landing on the Tempest being interpreted as rain drops. A little research shows that a routine called Rain Check should go through data and remove these spurious reports but that doesn’t seem to be working with Tempest. Is Rain Check active with Tempest? Is there a way to avoid receiving annoying notifications for rain that are caused by short term bird visitation?
Thanks, Dave…

2

Raincheck only works in the USA, and runs somewhere after midnight but before 08.00 in the morning.

3

In the app you can go to Settings, Stations, station name, Manage Devices, select device, Advanced where you can see if RainCheck is enabled. The screen should look like this:

Screenshot_20200610-080012_Tempest
Screenshot_20200610-080012_Tempest1080×2193 113 KB

After it has run you should see the RainCheck icon Screenshot_20200610-080307_Tempest appear in the card view showing the previous day’s rain and in the rain graph at the bottom and possibly some other places. It hasn’t run fo me yet today so I don’t have a quick example to show.

Remember, tapping the Tempest icon Screenshot_20200610-080714_Tempest in the upper right hand corner changes to the card view. Basically, try tapping on anything in the app and you might discover another feature.

1 Like
4

Thanks! I found RainCheck and it is on. I see the RainCheck icon but it had no effect on my apparent bird rain under sunny skies. Is there a sensitivity adjustment?
This information should be in a manual. Thanks for sharing!
Dave…

5

RainCheck was on. I am in Colorado, USA and it is now 10am. No evidence of RainCheck other than the little icon.
Dave…

6

Of course raincheck is just trying to fix something, but it doesn’t know the absolute truth. It might or might not correct birds, but it tries. Give it some more time, perhaps in a few days you’ll see that raincheck indeed changes the amount of reported rain.

7

I have just had a deeper look into your data and RainCheck did indeed make an adjustment yesterday. It reduced the total accumulated Rainfall from 0.77 inches to 0.39 inches. This sort of information is available in the API

https://swd.weatherflow.com/swd/rest/observations/?device_id=69345&api_key=20c70eae-e62f-4d3b-b3a4-8586e90f3ac8

That link will show you the latest observation from your Tempest, but also two further fields of interest: precip_accum_local_yesterday and precip_accum_local_yesterday_final. The first is total accumulation before Raincheck and the second is accumulation after Raincheck. Remember the units are in mm.

The API documentation is here: https://weatherflow.github.io/SmartWeather/api/

1 Like
8

I have been out of town for most of two days. I see that rainfall has indeed been adjusted but the obvious erroneous data was not cleared by RainCheck. So two questions…

  1. The advertised accuracy of the rain accumulation is ± 10%, a pretty generous margin of error. RainCheck seems to think that the actual recorded value was in error by 49%! Really? I am not sure what to think about that. It is way more than a 10% error. I know that in Colorado I have seen rain on one side of the street and sunshine on the other. In my particular area, the other nearby stations on your map are not real close. So where does this correction come from and why should I believe it? Unfortunately we took our old weather station down when we put up the Tempest so I couldn’t compare readings.
  2. At 5:14 pm after the storm in question there was a spike in data. I got a notification of “rain in Big Meadow”. The sun was shining and the sky was mostly blue. I assumed (not good I know) that the spike was erroneous perhaps caused by birds landing on the detector. Certainly, it was not raining. In my readings on the forum there seems to be a continuing issue with data spikes caused by birds. The consensus I found was that RainCheck would delete the bad data. The spike in my RainCheck adjusted data still remains so apparently RainCheck thinks it is valid. False positives and associated false notifications are not welcome. How can I eliminate these? I want to be notified about real rain only.
    Thanks,
    Dave…
1 Like
9

raincheck isn’t a miracle cure. If it would know exactly how much it rained at your location, you wouldn’t need a rain sensor in the tempest. Total rain amount measured by the tempest will often be inaccurate. That’s just the way it is. Where the rain sensor is good at, is giving you a pretty fast warning when it does start to rain. Sometimes it also gives you that notification when a bird lands on your unit.