New feature

Several of you have noted there has been no report for multiple day accumulation reports. You have also noted that any rain recorded through the multiple day accumulation system was not counted in your weekly or monthly precip reports.

I finally had time to work on that this past week and have that partially completed. If you have recorded your rainfall today using any of the three pages (multiple day accumulation, multiple zero readings or daily precip), you may have noticed a new addition to the page that shows what days you have not entered any rainfall data for. This is a result of this new partially completed feature. I can now track how much rainfall has been entered regardless of what method was used to enter it. The primary benefit is that I will also be able to show what your weekly and monthly rainfall totals are. When you log in, you can see at the top of the “reports” section, a new link to “Multiple-Day Precip” with another line that promises a page for total combined precip from both daily and multiple day precip.

With the calendars on the entry pages, you should be able to keep track of what days your precip has already been entered for. This will also prevent most duplicate records from being entered into the system.

Changes are not without problems so I need your help to clean up the records

Unfortunately, what this new feature has uncovered is that because you didn’t previously have any way to keep track of days you did or did not enter multiple day accumulation, it has led to duplicate and sometimes conflicting records for rainfall on a few days. Out of the over 21,000 records that are already in the system, I have questions on about 200 of them. That means over 99% are good but we still don’t want that bad info with even 1% if we can prevent it.

If you have used the multiple day accumulation reporting system in the past, please log on, go to: http://dnrdata.dnr.ne.gov/NeRAIN/Reports/Index.asp, click on “Multiple-Day Precip” and print out your report. Do the same for your “Daily Precip” from that same page. You may find some conflicting information. I will be going through the records to try to resolve what the information SHOULD be compared to what it is now which will require some editing of the data. Once I have completed all the editing in about two weeks, I’ll let you know so you can compare what you had before. Then let me know where I made the wrong guesses.

When the data is cleaned up, I’ll finish the combined precip report so you will finally see how much total rain you have been getting.

Bug Report

An observer recently reported the Station Address assigned to him through the application process didn’t appear to be correct. As you probably know, the Station Address represents your city, distance from your city, and the direction. I discovered the part of the program that computes distances and directions has a bug in it where this information is sometimes not calculated correctly. Since I’ve developed the system, I’ll take the blame for it and I’ll fix it but I did want to let you know in advance that there is an 8.595% chance your Station Address may be changing this week because this will affect 52 of the 605 NeRAIN stations.

New Uses for NeRAIN

I’ve heard this week that several of you farmers are using the data to help plan your future irrigation needs. I also got a message from a US Fish and Wildlife Service rep that is using the information to help manage property they are charged with maintaining in Nebraska. As the word of this service spreads, LOTS more people will be able to benefit by your volunteer efforts. You are all to be commended. If you are using the data or know of someone else that is, please have them contact me and let me know.

Out of town

If you try to contact me this following week, don’t expect a reply any time soon. I will be out of the office from Aug. 7 to Aug. 14. I’ve also heard that Coordinators Larry Schultz (Lower Loup NRD) and Kara Gall (Middle Republican NRD) will also be out that week and possibly longer so if you try to contact us and no one replies promptly, it is because no one is home. Don’t try to make a joke out of that, OK? :)

Thanks again for volunteering for NeRAIN.

Rich Kern
Nebraska Department of Natural Resources
301 Centennial Mall South
P.O. Box 94676
Lincoln, NE 68509-4676
(402) 471-3948
rkern@dnr.ne.gov