When bad things happen to good networks

It was not originally intended that our network at the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources was going to be monitored on a 365 day per year 24/7 basis where it absolutely had to be running every moment of every day. That takes more staff time than taxpayers would want to pay. AND, as I’m sure most of you have experienced, computers do need to be rebooted on occasion when things go wrong. The combination of those two factors means that sometimes during off-working hours, problems such as many of you experienced this past weekend with the NeRAIN project where for whatever reason, website access was not available. The chances are, I will already know about it because I am trying to enter my data the same as you but I can’t do anything about it either since I don’t have the access to work on that part of our network. If we find that we can’t log on to enter our data, we’ll just have to wait until the next work day when the IT people who know what they are doing can get the network back in working order again. I know this can be a bit frustrating but thanks for your understanding on this.

New Feature #1 – Hail Reports

At long last, now that the hail season is pretty much over :), I have developed a page to display information from your hail reports. You can access this information by going to the reports section and selecting the Hail Summary option. This will show all the hail reports and clicking on either the highlighted “Quick” or “Detail” hyperlink by each report will take you to the details. Also as normal, you can click on any column heading to sort by that item and view the data in a different way.

New Feature #2 – Rainfall Graphs

This is one that I have wanted to develop for quite a while. There are two graphs for each station and with them you can view the daily (or multi-day) rainfall for each event, see what days you may have missed, and compare that to the normal rainfall averaged over the period from 1971-2000 for the nearest “official” weather station to each of our volunteer stations. You can view this information on a monthly graph or on a graph that shows the deviation from normal on an annual basis.

Access to this information is available in three different ways. When you are logged on to your account, you can go to “reports” and click on “View Graph of Daily & Normal Precip” or “View Graph of Annual Deviation from Normal” near the top of the page to view just your station. Also from the “reports” section, you can click on “List of Active Stations” option and then select either graph from any station. The third way to view any of the stations is to go to the “maps” section, select “Station Locations” and “Show Map”. Then drill down to any county and select “Show Weather Stations” above the upper right corner of the map. This will show all the “official” weather stations along with a line leading to each of the volunteer stations that are nearest. Then if you click on any of our volunteer stations when you are viewing the map at the county level, you will see the monthly graph of precip at that station along with the normal precip at the “official” nearby station. You can also easily switch to the annual deviation graph for that same station via a link at the top of each graph.

I like these graphs because you can see if you are above or below normal precipitation on an almost daily basis.

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