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Fact Sheet 2013–3035

New Service Interface for River Forecasting Center Derived Quantitative Precipitation Estimates

By David L. Blodgett

Thumbnail of and link to report PDF (522 KB)Summary

For more than a decade, the National Weather Service (NWS) River Forecast Centers (RFCs) have been estimating spatially distributed rainfall by applying quality-control procedures to radar-indicated rainfall estimates in the eastern United States and other best practices in the western United States to producea national Quantitative Precipitation Estimate (QPE) (National Weather Service, 2013). The availability of archives of QPE information for analytical purposes has been limited to manual requests for access to raw binary file formats that are difficult for scientists who are not in the climatic sciences to work with. The NWS provided the QPE archives to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the contents of the real-time feed from the RFCs are being saved by the USGS for incorporation into the archives. The USGS has applied  time-series aggregation and added latitude-longitude coordinate variables to publish the RFC QPE data. Web services provide users with direct (index-based) data access, rendered visualizations of the data, and resampled raster representations of the source data in common geographic information formats.

First posted August 13, 2013

For additional information contact:
Director, USGS Center for Integrated Data Analytics
U.S. Geological Survey
8505 Research Way
Middleton, Wisconsin 53562
http://cida.usgs.gov/

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Suggested citation:

Blodgett, D.L., 2013, New service interface for River Forecasting Center derived quantitative precipitation estimates: U.S. Geological Fact Sheet 2013–3035, 2 p., https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2013/3035.



 


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