Rainfall data in itree hydro

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larsvankleef
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Sep 02, 2016 8:36 am

Rainfall data in itree hydro

Post by larsvankleef » Tue Oct 25, 2016 10:44 am

Hello everyone,

I have been testing out some things in i-Tree Hydro, since I am not in the US I am using a raw weather data file. It is all working as planned, except for the fact rain events are sometimes counted double. For instance, the actual weather data has 4mm, 1mm, 0mm, 3mm in four hours in a row. The model would make the 0mm around 3mm to make the graph more flowing, which is not what I want because it changes my outputs. The executive summary shows 1019mm of rain per year, while it should be around 700m.

Image

This screenshot shows the problem, the hour before the peak in rainfall will get a value which is higher than the actual rainfall at that point.

Does anybody have a fix to this problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Kind regards,
Lars
rcoville
i-Tree Team
Posts: 64
Joined: Fri May 08, 2015 9:29 am
Location: Syracuse, NY

Re: Rainfall data in itree hydro

Post by rcoville » Tue Oct 25, 2016 10:59 am

Hi Lars,

Please send the raw weather file you're using in this project, or at least a snippet of it for the hours in the screenshot. I'll take a look at that input and how the model is processing it to see if we can work a solution out from there.

In case you can't attach the file to a reply in this forum, you can email it to info@itreetools.org instead and I'll get it there.

Thanks and regards,
Robbie
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larsvankleef
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Sep 02, 2016 8:36 am

Re: Rainfall data in itree hydro

Post by larsvankleef » Wed Oct 26, 2016 2:50 am

Thanks! I just sent you an email.
rcoville
i-Tree Team
Posts: 64
Joined: Fri May 08, 2015 9:29 am
Location: Syracuse, NY

Re: Rainfall data in itree hydro

Post by rcoville » Wed Oct 26, 2016 10:32 am

I received the raw weather file you sent. I'm noticing similar issues in the conversion of raw weather data to processed weather data. I'll go over this today with the Hydro model development team to get some clarification.

So far I've been focusing in on the early section of your weather timeseries. To make sure I address the example you gave, please let me know what date & time you zoomed in on for your initial post.
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larsvankleef
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Sep 02, 2016 8:36 am

Re: Rainfall data in itree hydro

Post by larsvankleef » Thu Oct 27, 2016 5:28 am

Thank you for discussing it :)
I just zoomed in to a time period that illustrated my problem, I am having the problem for the entire period of the model. I do not remember which day I used in my screenshot.
rcoville
i-Tree Team
Posts: 64
Joined: Fri May 08, 2015 9:29 am
Location: Syracuse, NY

Re: Rainfall data in itree hydro

Post by rcoville » Fri Oct 28, 2016 9:43 am

We looked into the issue and found that we were able to overcome it by using an alternative weather preprocessor we have. Part of the challenge was that the raw weather file had some missing data and invalid entries which prevented our alternative weather preprocessor from accepting it. The following two timesteps are examples of ones the weather preprocessor couldn't work through:

201503271500 (March 27, 2015 15:00)
201509070700 (September 07, 2015 07:00)

I'm about to email you back with processed weather files you can use in your i-Tree Hydro project. My checks so far show the processed weather matching the raw weather you sent us correctly. Please let me know if that works for you or not.

We'll also continue looking into the built-in weather preprocessor to track down exactly why these abnormalities came up with the raw weather data in the first place.
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