Maybe I’m missing something but I’ve dug through the API documentation and haven’t found anything that explains exactly what these various fields are. In the sky & tempest observations, what exactly do the “Rain Accumulated Final (Rain Check)” and “Local Day Rain Accumulation Final (Rain Check) (mm)” fields represent? Under what conditions to they get updated, and also reset?
Some thoughts, but by no means a definitive answer.
I believe these fields are populated once RainCheck has been run. That will be sometime after midnight and before 8 am for stations in the continental USA. I assume for stations outside this area they will always remain at zero.
One rain check has run for a station, and you query the API for data from the previous day (i.e. the day that has just been adjusted by RainCheck) these fields should be populated.
This will give the rain accumulation values for each one minute observation period after the RainCheck correction has been applied.
This will give the total rain accumulation since midnight local time after RainCheck has been applied.
Hope this helps
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Writing as sub in VBA for Excel to summarize the previous day’s observations using the Rest Std and want to post the rain accumulated. Not quite sure I understand these observations.
(12) Rain Accumulation (mm) by min appears to be the raw data from the Tempest sensor
(18) Local Day appears to be the accumulation by min of (12)
(19) appears to be some adjustment by min ? what are these adjustments
(20) appears to be (18) + (19)
Correct, this is the raw 1-minute rain accumulation values reported by the Tempest
Correct, this is the total accumulation between midnight and midnight in the station time zone (i.e. the local day rather than UTC).
This is a post-processed version of (12) after RainCheck has been run. RainCheck is a QC process available for stations in the contiguous US states that attempts to adjust for the uncertainty in the haptic sensor using third-party rain accumulation information. There is more information here: Introducing RainCheck
(20) is the same as (18) except it uses the RainCheck adjusted 1-minute accumulation values (i.e. 19) to calculate the total local day rain accumulation.
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