Acquisition Of Rainfall Dataset And The Application For The Automatic Harvester In The Chesapeake Bay Region

The objective of this study is the preparation and indexing of rainfall data products for ingestion into the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO) node of the CUAHSI/WATERs network. Rainfall products (which are obtained and then processed based on the WSR-88D NEXRAD network) are obtained from the NOAA/NWS Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service that combines the Multi-sensor Precipitation Estimate (MPE) data generated by the Regional River Forecast Centers and Hydro-NEXRAD rainfall data generated as a service by the University of Iowa. The former is collected on 4*4 km grid (HRAP) with a daily average temporal resolution and the latter on a 1minute*1minute degree grid with hourly values. We have generated a cut-out for the Chesapeake Bay Basin that contains about 9,300 nodes (sites) for the MPE data and about 300,000 nodes (sites) for the Hydro-NEXRAD product. Automated harvesting services have been implemented for both data products. The MPE data is harvested from its download site using ArcGIS which in turn is used to extract the data for the Chesapeake Bay watershed before a scripting program is used to scatter the data into the ODM. The Hydro-NEXRAD is downloaded from a web-based system at the University of Iowa which permits downloads for large scale watersheds organized by Hydraulic Unit Codes (HUC). The resulting ASCII is then automatically parsed and the information stored alongside the MPE data. The two data products stored side-by-side then allows a comparison between them addressing the accuracy and agreement between the methods used to arrive at rainfall data as both use the raw reflectivity data from the WSD-88D system.