Purpose
Early notification of heavy rainfall and identification of the rainfall location. This service is advisory in nature and intended as a “wakeup call” to review the current or impending rainfall situation.
Characteristics
- The RV alert is based on provisional data that has not been reviewed.
- Automated algorithms are used to adjust the radar field with rain gauge data.
- The accuracy of the amount of rainfall can be degraded if the system does not detect a minimum threshold of qualifying rain gauge data because the radar field is not improved with rain gauge data.
- To provide the most timely information available, the system does not wait for rain gauges to report data.
- Hail contamination of radar is mitigated but can still cause an overestimation of the quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE).
- The system reprocessing improves the QPE so that better information can be accessed over time.
- Radar and rain gauge communications and other errors can occur that affect data quality.