How much rain did we get? Ask the iRain app created at UCI
In this rain-dampened week, UC Irvine engineers are hoping that researchers, hydrologists and weather enthusiasts are making the most of the iRain mobile app they recently developed.
The free app, launched in November, displays animations that show the amounts of rain around the world. It is capable of zooming in on local areas and selecting certain periods of rainfall.
Users also can submit reports on rain and snow in their areas to the application, which is available for iPhones and Android devices.
The concept was thought up by Phu Nguyen, an assistant adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Nguyen began to develop the application years ago as a UCI graduate student along with civil and environmental engineering professor Kuo-lin Hsu and Soroosh Sorooshian, director of the UCI Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing.
Using an algorithm created by Hsu, the iRain app gets information on rainfall around the planet by processing data from orbiting satellites.
Since Hsu developed the algorithm almost 20 years ago, graduate students have refined it.
“Using the app to track down how much rainfall there is and the movement of the rainfall is useful for everyone, particularly disaster managers,” Hsu said.
“This has provided an alternative,” Sorooshian said. “Usually, rainfall info is collected through gauges, or some countries have radar systems. But many of the countries’ resources are lacking, so they don’t necessarily have good comprehensive coverage.”
Though the app doesn’t give users an indication of rainfall occurring in real time, Hsu said it has reduced the wait for data retrieval, processing and distribution to about an hour.
Based on the downloading statistics the app team has been tracking, Sorooshian estimated it has had 2,000 users in the past few months.
Many of the app’s capabilities can be viewed and used at irain.eng.uci.edu.
“As far as I know,” Nguyen said in a statement, “we’re the only institution offering such a device.”
Twitter: @AlexandraChan10
