Precipitation from observations

[jsminor16]

The precipitation values from the api are different than the ones on the website. It almost seems like an integer is being passed instead of a float? I either get 0 or nan for values. The zeroes line up with the hourly report of rain on the website. nan's line up with the hours when there wasn't any rain.

[sullynole]

Are the values less than 0.4"? There is a known issue mentioned on the updates tab here: https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

[sthiboldeaux]

I am noticing a similar issue, but it seems like the precip values are rounding to the nearest cm integer. This is 0 in many cases, but all other values are rounded integers (and shows up as multiples of 10 in mm).

#645

[sullynole]

That aligns with the known issue, which is a precision bug with ingest of precipitation values to API backend from MADIS.

[Drtrider]

Stumbled on this thread after digging into why most the precipitationLast3Hours (if not all) was always showing either 0 or None - looks like I found my reason:

The observations endpoints always show missing (null) wind gust and may show null values for other weather properties (temperature, wind, precipitation, etc.) at stations when the MADIS source has data.
Precipitation values in the observations endpoints are rounded down to the nearest centimeter (less than 0.4" may be improperly rounded down to 0).

That's a bummer. Anyone know of an alternative? Or another API endpoint that'll offer a similar metric?

[LorenzoPeve]

This issue still exists @nickmachairas.

[dangelsaurus]

Curious if anyone found another place to get precipitation data? Right now I'm relying on forecast data as a proxy for estimated rainfall, but would love observational data without having to manually pull up each station. https://www.weather.gov/wrh/timeseries?site=Kdfw

[sullynole]

RFC QPE: https://water.noaa.gov/about/precipitation-data-access

Also can be found in RTMA/URMA: https://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/rtma/