Thanks—I've changed the map so that it plots annual depth by default now. Yes I agree the popup is "unnecessary", but I wanted to make it easy for the site to be used for extreme stats without having to wade through seasonal stats first.
Thanks. I'll have a think about how I can make those comparison plots easier to find.
Yep, inundation mapping would certainly be useful to a much wider number of people. I'll have to look into the existing competition and work out whether there's space in the market for another player.
Yes, I've been focused on sales only for a number of months.
XRain is mostly designed to help in situations where data (free or otherwise) isn't available from anywhere else.
However I've come to realise that most places have some sort of data that they use and are familiar with, even if that data isn't very good. As a result people/companies haven't been very willing to part with their cash.
Exactly - I can tell you an example from India. India has the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) precipitation dataset. Even if your estimates are more accurate, no company will use your dataset to design/validate a civil engineering design. This has to do with liability of using a dataset from a "non-official" source. Right now, you are stuck in the middle where it is not viable for non-US companies to use it, while US companies will mostly rely on NOAA Atlas. If this is to become a public-facing product, then the current pricing is too high, and might have to develop an alternative business model. Maybe people are interested in checking the floodplain zonation/xrain before buying a house, for example. But no SAAS in that case.
How flexible is your codebase to incorporate regional datasets? I think you will have to regional merging.
What are your current costs of running the setup? Any possibility/plans of white-labeling the codebase?
When I was looking at purchasing a house in the Portland area, I wanted to know the sunlight per day over a year (the house was on a hill). There was a Swedish company that had an interesting service which would generate a sunlight report. I paid for it, about $20 if I recall correctly. The conversation here about people using this to determine flooding before purchasing a house seems similar.
Policy impediments to use are real! Your data gap-filler approach is interesting though.
Along this line… occasionally there is official but obviously-wrong data from even WMO accredited providers whose automatic weather stations ('AWS') are busted. Perhaps your approach would help provide a widely validated bound-check? The trouble is often that kind of undetected, obviously-wrong data, is also a symptom of 'we have no money to fix it'…
Missing most of the Nordics (most of Norway/Sweden, all of Finland and Iceland) .. is probably what you'll get the most complaints about with regards to this.
I used IMERG because it's historical satellite measurements, not re-analysis using a model.
The focus was on creating extreme precipitation stats at a global scale, something that wasn't previously available. Many potential customers wouldn't even be aware of GloH20, ERA5, etc.
Don't sell your potential customers too short. We've outsourced analysis to be done with ERA5 dataset to an external vendor. There are many who know what to do and can do it themselves, but would rather outsource for liability reasons.
