Saturday, November 14, 2009

Big Rain


Over the past few days the remnant Hurricane IDA interacted with a deep trough and eventually formed an impressive Nor'Easter off the coast of North Carolina. Rainfall totals were impressive. The graphic in this post gives the 7 day totals as derived by radar. The two days of observations I took at my CoCoRaHS.ORG 'official' 4" plastic rain gage (NC-WK-75) came out about 3.6 inches of rain. I also put out a 'bucket' and this morning emptied 26 1/8 cups of water from the bucket. The diameter of the bucket was 12.25 inches. The four inch rain gage collects about 7 ounces of water per inch of rain. So doing the math I get 3.17 inches of rain in the bucket which is pretty close since I just dipped out two cup measures to measure the bucket and the bucket does not have 'sharp' edges (not very analytical but it does give me good feeling that I got a bit over 3 inches of rain for the storm).