We at the River Forecast Center appreciate offers to collect precipitation data in addition to your river level reports. If you are interested, please let us know when you call in April. We will mail you a 4” plastic rain gage. Read below for instructions on installing and reading plastic rain gages. Feel free to call us if you have any questions with the setup of the gage. We prefer that you choose the site so that it is in a convenient location for you. When installed, please make a note of its location on the form enclosed in this packet labeled 4” Plastic Rain Gage Installation. You can ignore the latitude, longitude, and elevation unless you know them. In your description, include the relationship of the location of the rain gage to the river gage. Generally, we would like you to take the rain gage observation once a day at roughly the same time each day. Ideally it should be taken at the same time as the river level reading and reported on the same phone call with the river observation. This value should also be marked down on your B-91 form in the 4th column for 24 hour precipitation. Record the value 0 if the gage is read and it is empty, record an M if the data are missing.
If you have heavy rain and you read the gage more than once a day (on your own initiative or at our request), please report on the phone and in the remarks column of the B-91 form the time and incremental readings that were taken. The incremental readings can be totaled to get the 24 hour value for column 4 of the form.
If you miss one or more days of rainfall observations, let us know over the phone that the rainfall amount that you are reporting is the amount accumulated over the past two days or whatever period is represented. On the B-91 form, put a vertical line in column 4 through the dates for which you have no data and put the accumulated total in for the date that it was collected.
Again, we would appreciate your offer to collect rainfall data and hope that it is useful information to you as well.