Time Lapse of Hurricane Matthew Rains Eastern NC

[wxman13]

Thought you guys might like to see a time lapse of Hurricane Matthew Rains in Eastern NC recorded using WeatherCat. Final total for the day was 12.43" , lost power so the video ends showing less than the total.
My parents had substantial flood damage, next door .

www.wral.com/news/video/16105531/

[Felix]

Unbelievable!!!


Any chance you can look up the max rainfall rate? Actually though, it probably exceeded the capability of the tipping bucket to keep up with a rainfall like that. I'd have to go to the manual to see what Davis claims the specs are.


Thanks for posting.

[xairbusdriver]

The problem with the tipping bucket and that kind of rain is that it starts over-heating! That causes some of the moisture to evaporate rather than tip the bucket!

Good to know you didn't have any rain-soaking problems!

[elagache]

Dear wxman13, Felix, X-Air and WeatherCat folks who deal with whatever the weather throws at them.

Thought you guys might like to see a time lapse of Hurricane Matthew Rains in Eastern NC recorded using WeatherCat. Final total for the day was 12.43" , lost power so the video ends showing less than the total.

Really amazing!  The video is amazing enough but to see the WeatherCat data in the lower left corner really brings home the extremity of the storm!

My parents had substantial flood damage, next door .

Sorry to hear that.  Are the managing to put things back together as best they can?

Cheers, Edouard

[wxman13]

Thanks Edouard, and yes they are getting things back to some normalcy, they were lucky the water was about 6-8" from going inside their home, everything outside was submerged.
There are lots of people South and East of myself who have lost everything from the ongoing river flooding, that has surpassed the records that Hurricane Floyd set back in 1999 in this area

Felix the highest rainfall rate I could find in the WeatherCat data was 6.55" ,  rainfall rates of around 2-6.5" were maintained for nearly the entire period of the time lapse video

And I'm sure lots of tips of the Davis rain gauge were missed during the period, the official NWS recording station about 20 miles SE of me (Seymour Johnson Air Force Base) recorded 15.5" during the same period. My Stratus gauge which I use to compare my Davis reading , which you can see directly across the path only holds 11" so it was of no use to compare to the Davis gauge.

Not sure how to correct the total rainfall for that date 10/8/16 on (KNCPRINC1) WeatherUnderground, when power was restored 2 days later the Historical data upload from weathercat was interrupted due to the fact that power came on for about 10min then went back off again. I've sent a email to support on WeatherUnderground to get it corrected but haven't heard anything.

Robert

[Blicj11]

Amazing time lapse video. Thanks for sharing.

[elagache]

Dear Robert, Blick, and WeatherCat station caregivers,

Not sure how to correct the total rainfall for that date 10/8/16 on (KNCPRINC1) WeatherUnderground, when power was restored 2 days later the Historical data upload from weathercat was interrupted due to the fact that power came on for about 10min then went back off again. I've sent a email to support on WeatherUnderground to get it corrected but haven't heard anything.

So what exactly did WeatherCat do because of the power interruption?  WeatherCat didn't try to complete the historical upload when power came back?

I think there might an important lesson in your experience.  There is no reason to get WeatherCat running immediately after a power outage if you have a station with a large data logger like Davis.  Here is a table of how long you can go without losing data with a Davis station for varioius sampling intervals:

http://wiki.trixology.com/index.php?title=Capacity_of_the_Davis_data-logger_to_store_weather_data_depending_on_the_chosen_sampling_interval

Since having the power fail on your computer is potentially seriously harmful to the computer.  It might be a good idea to wait something like 1/2 hour to make sure the power is going to stay on before powering up computers.

You might still get a reply from Weather Underground.  They might be swamped with these sorts of requests.

Cheers, Edouard

[wxman13]

I have my iMac on a UPS, and I have the iMac set to power back on after power failure, so when the power came back on the iMac booted back up. I have WeatherCat setup to load on startup, so when WeatherCat started back up when the power initially came on it began to automatically send historical data to weather underground, but immediately after the historical upload started the power immediately went back off again, so the historical upload was interrupted , so I'm assuming Weathercat will not re-start the historical data upload again after it is first initialized?

[elagache]

Dear Robert and WeatherCat "hackers,"

so I'm assuming Weathercat will not re-start the historical data upload again after it is first initialized?

I had to think about this a little.  No it won't once it is running normally because it creates this file:

~/Library/Application Support/WeatherCatTemp/WeatherCatLastWundergroundUpload.plist

There are instructions on the WeatherCat Wiki on how to change the date of this file so that WeatherCat thinks the last download occurred before the storm:

http://wiki.trixology.com/index.php?title=How_to_force_WeatherCat_to_submit_historical_data

If you follow those instructions it should allow you to upload all the missing data.

Cheers, Edouard 

[wxman13]

Thanks Edouard, I'll give that a try, finally got a response back from WeatherUnderground, they said that they could not add rainfall data only delete it? I could have sworn I had a similar situation a few years ago and they were able to correctly add the missing rainfall data.
Robert