my new job

I haven't posted anything since last spring. 2006 was a busy year. The Rainfall Company experienced a great deal of change in the last three years, culminating last year in the grounding of a new team.

I had the non-unique experience of breast cancer last fall. Early detection and good health insurance: I got rid of the cancer and can move on with my life. I'm more than ever concerned about those who don't have good (or any) health insurance, don't get screened and don't get to move on. Anyway, like any of the proverbial brushes with mortality, this one triggered some questions in me and caused me to rearrange some priorities.

Since 1999 I was President & CEO of OneRain, and starting this year I'm merely CEO. This is very good - the guy who's running the company instead of me is much better at process and at executing according to a system view. These are important to operating a company successfully and probably not my strongest points (colleagues can be heard giggling in the background). Our company has matured. It requires a skilled manager and I'm more of an entrepreneur by temperament.

So what's my new job like? I'm just figuring that out. I have time and energy to spend outside the company that I didn't have before, and I find myself already in exploratory mode. I think I will get more "real" work done - talking to the people working in our domain and finding out what their challenges are, getting ideas for new ways to approach problems in measuring rainfall and its consequences.

I'm excited about spending time with our outside partners. As a small company we rely on close collaborative relationships with other companies to extend our reach without creating inefficiency. Common wisdom has it that small businesses are dramatically more efficient than large businesses. I think that small businesses working with one another in close collaboration can be even more efficient. It also makes life much more interesting.

James and I (James Logan is the guy running the company, our new President and still our COO) organized a company meeting last week to kick off our new year. Comunicating is our theme for this year. It's a huge part of my job to communicate. I am responsible for bringing information back and forth between the outside world and our company. It is my responsibility to communicate our vision, to help it evolve and to keep everyone who is part of this evolution in the loop.

The highest calling of my job to explore the boundaries of what we do as a company. How are we most useful, in what ways can our enterprise make the greatest contribution? What innovations are required to make our clients' working lives better and their missions more successful? Which ones make sense to pursue ourselves now, which ones should we pursue in concert with partners, and which ones are sexy but don't add to the outcome.

Finally, it is also my job to keep a balanced life so I can continue being productive. Skiing, spending time with kids (when they're around!), sharing home and kitchen with friends, performing loyally my Pilates training, riding my motorcycle, flying a helicopter, playing and listening to music, reading, cuddling the dogs, sharing early mornings with my friends at the coffee house - these are the things that keep me sane and healthy. Without them I don't have anywhere near the energy required to do all the things I described above.

Everyone needs to do things that restore energy, it's just the "what" that varies from person to person.

I hope OneRain has an excellent year and serves its clients well. I believe I will, and they are not independent. If I do well in my new job, my joy in working will create success for the company, and the company's success will create satisfaction and joy for me.

modeling, rainfall and old brain

Last week my business partner, James Logan, and I spent two days in a hands-on computer workshop learning to use the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers modeling tools HEC RAS and HEC GeoRAS. It was really interesting and I think it will help both of us do a better job of understanding the challenges our engineering colleagues address routinely. We both passed, or at least they gave us each a certificate.

Our company, OneRain, supports engineering partners who build hydrologic forecast models. We provide them with the real-world data history they require to "calibrate" the river basins for which they are responsible. In particular, they need to know what sort of historical rainfall events were associated with what river responses. This history plus various model frameworks allow them to build a computational tool that can forecast what river response to expect, given rainfall information. Using HEC RAS they can forecast flows that will result downstream from various input flows, and using HEC GeoRAS they can create 3D maps that show resulting inundation patterns.

James has a B.S. in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines as part of his preparation for what we do (oh yeah, there's also that M.S. in computer science - he's well-prepared). I'm way behind that - my early background was in wetware (neuroscience; there's hardware, software, and then there's wetware, and that was my area). I was honestly worried that I would have a hard time keeping up in this seminar, having no background other than basic physics and math. I do have many years of exposure through my work to the concerns of our engineering collaborators, but having to do their work myself concerned me. There's also that general "old brain" worry - now that I've passed 50 I don't trust my brain to do things as well as it has in the past.

James pointed out that it was "interesting" to be in class with me. I would jump ahead on the problems rather than listening, and he noted afterward that more than once I asked questions which had already been answered. In the end, I had no trouble understanding the material and I found myself compelled by the tools to which we were introduced in this seminar. I now know enough to be dangerous. Nevertheless, I am very aware of what he pointed out to me, kindly but clearly; my vulnerability is to worry so much about not comprehending something correctly that I fail to listen. Lesson heard: I will do better next time.

I also learned that this isn't where the meat of what we do lies. HEC RAS and GeoRAS don't deal with rainfall at all, they're all about hydraulics and its consequences. They assume we understand everything about the hydrology already, and we're just looking at what happens to known amounts of water in the channels and the floodplain. If we want to understand how rainfall drives the hydrologic aspects of the models we're looking at, we must go further back to the data that were used to generate the hydrographs we used, in this case HEC HMS.

I'm pretty sure the methods by which the hydrographs we used in class were generated don't reflect reality, and that there isn't really a lot of disagreement about that. There also often isn't a lot of eagerness to do things differently because we're better with the devil we know than the devil we don't. As the rainfall company that's our big challenge - to come up with better ways to support these modeling approaches than what we've all been able to do to date. I believe we're just getting started on this track, although we've already made some strides with the combination of rain gages with radar rainfall data. The fact is, if we make big mistakes in understanding how much it rained to produce the hydrologic response we observe, then we are still not going to build a model that is correct for the real world.

We aren't alone in this effort, and everyone working in this domain is making steps toward improving our understanding of rainfall and how it really drives the hydrologic cycle. I am excited that my job permits me, no, requires me to continue learning and maturing my knowledge acquisition skills. I will do my darnedest to succeed so that I can achieve my goal of doing something useful. It may sound like a modest goal, but I have found it's a pretty big challenge.

graupel on the beach - spring at A Basin

It is a spring tradition to spend beach front time at Arapahoe Basin in the Colorado Rockies. Located on the western side of Loveland Pass, A Basin breaks the 12,000-foot barrier to bring great skiing as late as July in big snow years. The views from the summit are breathtaking, and the lifts' top are a launching platform for intrepid chute hunters who take their skis off and start climbing the ridge above to find virgin snow and steeps. A Basin has been delighting us Coloradans with its terrain and wonderful scenery since it opened in 1946. The ski resort itself has not changed so much since its inception; it has a rustic realness that the high-end destination resorts lost long ago if they ever had it.

My personal relationship with A Basin goes back 30 years. It's one of my favorite places to ski and has so many memories for me, not all of them wonderful. I tore my anterior cruciate ligament on the catwalk that connects Pallavicini ("Palli", above in the foreground and looking toward the East Wall in the background - picture: www.coloradoskihistory.com), the Basin's signature ski run, to the base lift in May of 1984, another gorgeous spring ski day like yesterday. I think about that fateful run every time I carefully ski the catwalk, as I did yesterday.

Yesterday my friend Keith invited me to their company's spring beach party. I told Don I'd just go for a short time - it's only an hour's drive from our home. Keith and Trudy had dropped a car off early in the morning to reserve their group's spot at the beach, which is the edge of the muddy, rutted parking lot that abuts the bottom of the ski runs. They brought a gas grill, tables, a boom box, lots of camping chairs and a picnic griller's selection of wonderful foods and beer. There were as many as 18 in the group, babies and middle-aged folks like me, and everyone in between.

When I got there at 11 a.m. the party was just starting to swing. Along the beach there were dogs, tents, chaise lounges, stereos, kegs, and snow toys of all sorts. People were skiing in interesting attire, ranging from standard ski gear through a fluorescent pink zoot suit with accompanying fedora. At the lodge the band was setting up for an afternoon of rock'n'roll. My arrival garb was shorts, tank top and flipflops. (picture: www.schussbaumer.com)

The snow at the bottom was soft and getting wet, classic spring snow. The sun was bright, the temperature balmy and I briefly considered staying with the shorts and tank top, but I knew better from many years of experience. I pulled on my snow pants and brought mittens, a headband, a hoodie and a windbreaker. We got on the Exhibition lift and headed up to mid-mountain. Sure enough, by the time we loaded ourselves on the upper lift the sky had gotten dark, and upon reaching the top we were enveloped in graupel.

Graupel is a wonderful form of precipitation. It is not snow, not hail, not sleet, and definitely not rain. The stuff we played with on and off yesterday was like styrofoam; dry and compressible, it could be made to stick to itself but contained so much air it took lots of it to make a snow ball. As we got off the lift we put on all the clothes we had with us. By the time we pointed our skis downhill, the graupel had turned to sleety snow. Skiing was blind - wet snow coated my face and sunglasses and as I skied fast into the wind, the plastic frames froze the bridge of my nose to a painful attention focus. We stopped and regrouped, gathering our strength and trying not to shiver.

I pushed off again, this time with the light so flat the contours of the bumps and surfaces disappeared. Every slight topographic change was a surprise to my feet, making it a challenge to keep my balance. I started to feel a little bilious. That sensation triggered another A Basin memory from many years ago, when Don and I skied with our kids and Lissa got motion sick in the fog. The full story requires audience permission to tell in detail, so I won't go on.

Yet even as I thought about those times the fast-moving clouds changed and sun began to dominate the scene. The bumps under the Exhibition lift were clear to the eye and the rocks stuck out with high contrast (thank heaven! my skis are still new). We made the bottom and it was time for a beer and bratwurst. These normally tasty items acquire a magical flavor when consumed in the snow under blue sky with puffy white clouds and the sun hot on us again.

Then Keith and I headed for Palli, in my mind the whole reason for having a party. Pallavicini was named for 19th century climber Alfred Markgraf Pallavicini, who pioneered a dramatic direct route up the Grossglockner in Austria in 1876. Many mountaineers lost their lives attempting to climb the Grossglockner, another mountain that lives also in my personal history. Palli at A Basin is an ideal slope for building large, regular bumps that delight skiiers in the spring when the snow begins to soften. Neighboring glades and chutes bring their own joy, and all must be explored to have the complete experience.

Conditions yesterday were close to ideal, at least from the top through the middle of the run. The bumps were big and soft, and the steepness drove us smoothly down even as the snow eventually became slower and softer. We made big flying turns down the center, reveling in the rhythm we set up. Every so often we'd stop and I would realize that once again I'd forgotten to breathe - it took a minute for me to get my breath back under control. Keith was hacking with the end of his bronchitis; what a guy he is, not letting a little thing like adequate air stop him from being an awesome skier.

We encountered one of Keith's colleagues at the trough into which Palli funnels on the right side - he was making smooth progress through the bumps on his free-heel tele skis. It is such hard work, and he made it look so easy and graceful. By the time we reached Palli's base the snow had acquired snow cone characteristics. In some places the frozen mix incorporated enough mud that the friction slowed our skis abruptly, forcing us to pay close attention so as not to be launched onto our faces.

Then there remained the catwalk, a steep-walled trail from the base of the run across the hill. The catwalk itself isn't very steep, but if you're lazy and you ski straight down it rather than turning to control your speed, you could do what I did long ago; I caught an edge, lost my balance and planted both skis into the snowy uphill wall at high speed. My bindings did not release, and my left knee did. This time I was careful to ski all around, up the wall, into the woods, down steeply, anything but straight out. Another run, done, and the band was playing as we rejoined the lift line.

The rest of the afternoon slid by fast as such times always do. I skied until the lifts closed, thermo-regulating minute-to-minute between winter gear and tank top as the sun went in and out. I tried to keep up with the young guys on skis and snow boards and learned that my new Pilots are pretty fast (sometimes faster than I anticipate). We played on Palli and reveled in our freedom. On one run with another skier and a boarder we found a "floater" in the North Glades; a steep face fed a trail up through a small rock ridge that launched us into the air at its apex, only to float back to the snow below.

For the day's end we gathered a core group of 6-7 hot dog snow riders. We hammered the Exhibition bumps under the lift for two last runs after all the other lifts had closed; playing, throwing snowballs and showing off our prowess for the chair lift onlookers. And for our last run we found the best bumps of all, a slope behind trees that we had almost skied past, just west of Exhibition. It was sad to look up at the stationary chairs as the ski day ended; our hearts were ready to ski forever, even if our bodies would eventually say no.

After the lifts closed, the energetic young people launched a race series on the bunny slope, teaming to ride snow boards like snow saucers, fighting for the lead and chased by dogs and small children. We oldsters sat at the bottom in the camp chairs with our beer (Jacob's first-try home-brewed stout was awesome) and cheered them on as the variable clouds scattered sun and precip throughout. I hugged my generous hosts and thanked them for a wonderful day, switched back to the shorts, ran through the snow in my flipflops to find the lodge restroom (talk about getting cold feet), and then headed back for dinner with my sweetheart.

As I drove home over Loveland Pass (left, picture: www.idahosummits.com), I was once again awestruck by the landscape through which I passed. I listened to the Blind Boys of Alabama sing their gospel praise and reflected on my luck: to have lived years in this place of beauty and power, to have a mate who shares these values and understands my joy, and to have so often experienced skiing at the beach and the memories I'll keep.

flying on the wind - sun and virga

The shadows are growing longer now as the sun drops toward the Divide, and it was a beautiful day today. It started out with clouds and ice on the deck and evolved through virga mixed with sun into a puffy cloud day with spring colors everywhere. The green is starting to pop on the plains, thanks to the last few days of wetness.

I love the word "virga". It describes incomplete rainfall, rainfall that emerges from the clouds and doesn't make it to the ground. You can see it as dark vertical streaks in the sky below cumulus clouds, the streaks ending well up in the air. Virga is a cue to flyers to avoid the area nearby and underneath as there are sharp downdrafts associated with the rainfall's emergence from the cloud.

I found myself this morning in a Schweizer 300C, call sign N-299RJ or "helicopter two niner niner romeo juliet", to play on the breezes. The weather briefer told me there were substantial winds at altitude and that we would be in and out of turbulence today. I took off from Jefferson County Airport in Broomfield, Colorado, with a plan to fly the few miles to Boulder Municipal Airport and there to do some autorotations practice. Jeffco was just too busy with several helicopters underway and intermingled with the weekend Cessnas and corporate jets.

As we got above 1000 feet the unstable atmosphere was very noticeable. The biggest challenge today was to fly with the same power settings for more than a few seconds and still maintain altitude and airspeed. Just flying to Boulder was a challenge - Romeo Juliet wanted to soar higher and higher, and I fought to keep our altitude below the fixed wing air traffic levels. My job as a helicopter pilot is to avoid the normal flow of traffic, in other words to stay the heck out of other people's way.

We were all over the map - I spent 80% of my focus working on descending, because every time my attention wandered at all I would find suddenly I had gained another thousand feet or so! Updrafts everywhere, and the occasional virga with big, cold downdrafts just to keep me awake. Sunny ground interspersed with cumulus clouds, both conditions powerful and opposite in their impact on the winds.

As we came closer to Boulder, we saw the airport with clouds and virga closing in. We also saw high wind signatures on reservoirs nearby - the wind was roaring directly out of the north, pretty much a direct crosswind to the runway. Heck with that, we'll just go on to Longmont's Vance Brand Airport and do our practice work there. It was another five minutes' flight to reach Longmont and start our approach.

"Longmont traffic, helicopter two niner niner romeo juliet 4 miles southeast of the airport at 6500 feet, inbound for runway two niner, remaining in the pattern for helicopter practice, Longmont." There's no control tower here, and making the radio call lets other aircraft know we're coming in. Sure enough, a quick reply: "helicopter traffic be advised jumpers in the area." Longmont hosts a sky diving school, with a King Air to take folks up so they can jump out of the airplane and float back down to an area south of the runway. OK, I draw the line at this - I much prefer to remain in the aircraft at all times! I have flown around the jumpers here many times in the past, so I didn't hesitate on my approach.

We came in on a steep approach to hover over the numbers "29" at the near end of the runway, the mountains in front of us on our 290-degree approach angle. Holding the hover, the aircraft wanted to turn right into the wind - the stiff crosswind was noticeable. After a brief instruments check for the aircraft's health and adequate fuel, I nudged the cyclic gently forward to initiate take off. I did my radio call to take off toward the west and stay in the airport's traffic pattern. As we accelerated forward through ETL (the airspeed at which the helicopter begins flying out of its own rotor wash is called effective translational lift), I noticed a colorful canopy high in the sky to my left, south of the runway. Then I noticed a whole bunch more canopies, all brightly colored, ahead and above me in the sky. Oops, they're coming down right on top of me!

From my current halfway point on the runway I initiated a sharp right turn out to the north, flying low, fast and into the wind. "Longmont traffic helicopter niner romeo juliet departing the airport to the north avoiding the jumpers, Longmont." So much for doing helicopter practice here: the wind was crosswise and it was stirring the jumpers so I couldn't predict where they might be, and that made me way too uncomfortable. Anyway, it was another strong crosswind and autorotations just weren't happening here today. As I put the airport farther behind me I put the nose up and ascended out at 41 knots, the Schweizer's best rate of climb.

I turned out to the east and decided to buzz our office, see whether Tom came in to FedEx that proposal out. His car wasn't in the lot - I bet he'd long ago come and gone, early bird that he is. From there I flew toward my original helicopter birthplace, Tim's house and his company, Falcon Helicopters, southeast of our office. Falcon is the place where I started flying in 2000, where I achieved my proudest accomplishment to that date, my private pilot rating. Today as a more experienced commercial-rated pilot I practiced a turn around Tim's house in case he was looking. I hope he wasn't looking because my performance was terrible.

It is difficult to make a regular circle in high winds, as the helicopter behaves very differently depending on where the wind is. A good pilot makes this happen right regardless of the wind, manipulating power and speed to compensate for the uneven conditions, but my "circle" looked more like a tightly-strung bow, with a straight slanty line as I tried to turn through and away from the wind, until I turned far enough to power my way through a tight curve back to my starting place. Meanwhile, the wind had pushed me way south of where I wanted to be...arghh. I hope no one saw this one, especially my former teacher!

I flew back toward Jeffco and asked the tower air traffic controller if we could use taxiway Delta for helicopter practice. She was not in a good mood today, although she is usually really nice. She gave me some instructions that seemed contradictory, first to fly to Marshall Lake, west of the airport, and then she said to join the downwind leg of left traffic for taxiway Delta, which is a southerly path. I should have asked her for clarification right away, but instead I drifted toward the downwind direction she had described, a little uncertain. I had not yet crossed the path of the traffic departing the airport, and she told me sharply to descend (darn, my fault, today this helicopter is just soaring whenever I lose focus on altitude) and to keep flying toward the lake. Her instructions on how to get to Delta were spoken slowly and clearly, as though I might have trouble understanding English.

Message to self: don't take on her stress, just don't. When I fly, I've learned to talk through things out loud, speaking all of my flight-relevant thoughts whether I'm by myself or with someone else. Whether it's an instrument check or my next flight intention, it makes my thoughts real and makes it easier for me to confirm that I've taken care of things as I should. I essentially can follow my own intructions. So I followed my instructions to myself here and didn't take on her stress. I thanked her, repeated her instructions and followed them to the letter.

Dang, unbelievable. Even though there wasn't a lot of traffic at Jeffco as there had been earlier, there was a stiff crosswind on the taxiway. I said, "we aren't doing any autos today." OK, fine, we have lemons, we'll do lemonade. It was a very productive practice. Each time I took off I called the tower "Jeffco tower helicopter niner romeo juliet on the go", she replied with "helicopter niner romeo juliet cleared for the option Delta taxiway", and I said "helicopter niner romeo juliet cleared for the option, Delta." We were back in synch with each other, the familiar and comforting dialogue between pilot and protector.

I spent the rest of my flight doing normal, steep and runon landings, all with a stiff crosswind. It took a big right-cyclic move to hold the aircraft straight on the runway as I completed a couple very shallow approaches and ran the helicopter on to the runway at 30 knots, skids scraping along as I slowly lowered the collective, increasing the friction and gradually slowing us to a stop.

I practiced hovering 360 degree pedal turns, where I would turn my tail through the wind and prevent the aircraft from whipping around like a wind gage, keeping the turn controlled and smooth and not moving away from my pivot point. Much better than the turn around a point up high, it made me feel more competent again. Yeah!

Maximum performance takeoffs in a helicopter are vertical. Usually we take off like an airplane, making a small forward input on the cyclic that initiates hovering forward through ETL and then climbing out smoothly. But after all, we're a helicopter and we don't need no stinkin' runway, so we practice the vertical takeoffs from the runway, pretending there are trees or buildings around us that prevent that graceful normal departure. In this the wind is our friend. It blows away the turbulence our rotors create so we're already flying without moving. When we pull up on the collective, the aircraft soars straight up like a raven on an updraft, powerful and free. Today it felt as though we could keep climbing forever straight up.

But the earth was calling me back. The helicopter was scheduled to fly with another pilot in a short time, we were down to 8 gallons of gas, and it was time to request a return to our ramp, just across the main runway. I called the tower and asked permission to return. She was back in her other mood; something was wrong for her today. She asked me to fly all the way around the departing runway, rather than across the middle of it into the wind, and then she cleared me to land on runway two zero. "Two zero" means that the landing aircraft will land toward the southwest, at a 200 degree angle from north. This meant I would be landing with a substantial tailwind, a completely unacceptable situation from a safety standpoint and the opposite of normal behavior.

As a pilot it is my job to make the final decisions about what is safe. I asked her for clarification - did she really want me to fly around the departure end of the main runway, and she said yes in that sharp, slow-talking way, as though I were really recalcitrant. I reminded myself about the separation between her mood and mine. I flew around the end of the runway as she asked and then I flew downwind along the main runway and then through the hangars nearby to pull a sharp, steep descent into the wind, landing directly on the numbers "20" at the end of the runway but facing the northeast, or 20 degrees rather than 200. I switched the radio to the ground control radio frequency and requested a return from the runway to the ramp.

Oh boy, working the ground channel was the lady everyone thinks is a less than competent controller. She seems easily confused and she reacts to her confusion by talking more, something that frustrates pilots totally. No one can get a word in edgewise to get their business done, and she gets irritated because everyone else is irritated, and likely also because she senses her inadequacy. The more traffic, the worse it is. She has nevertheless been a controller at Jeffco for years now, and we've all gotten used to her style. I had no trouble following her instructions back to the ramp, about 100 feet from where I'd settled into a hover over the numbers.

My lessons today:

1) The lemons-lemonade thing. I set out to work on autorotations today, and I did not do even one. Yet I had a wonderful day flying in weather both challenging and beautiful, soaring above the verdant spring landscape of the great plains, the white-capped Rockies to the west, the broken clouds and virga creating flight challenges every second.

2) No arrogance. Whatever level of competency I think I may have achieved, I can be clumsy and incompetent on a moment's notice; just change something that's been the same for a while and I revert back to my student mode of trying to attain a performance level that seems totally out of reach. I will always be a student in the real world of life-long learning, and the wind will always be my teacher in flying.

3) No arrogance. I am less competent and less experienced than any of those grumpy, confused and confusing air traffic controllers. My own mistakes today at least matched theirs, and normally would exceed theirs. I had a good day because things came out right in the end - we landed shiny side up and walked away from the aircraft with both unscathed, a pilot's classic definition of a good day.

An excellent day, totally. Thanks for letting me share it with you. I'll explain autorotations some other time, when I actually get to do them.

blogging naif contemplates meaning of rainfall in her life

I'm writing this blog to share some of my experience with my company and career, in particular around the content of what we do and around my own adjustments to leadership.




My company is OneRain. We are experts in measuring rainfall and its consequences. We've been a company since 1992, and some of us started doing this type of work before that. I had no background in environmental or atmospheric science when I started - I got it all the long way.

I didn't expect to be a businessperson but rather pursued science. It took me forever to get out of graduate school with "a masters degree, in science!", I think because I wasn't satisfied with a theoretical life. I was 34 when I had my first real outside job in 1988. I loved the hands-on real world. I got sucked into a startup business and life as I had known it ended, becoming something brand new. Since then, that seems to happen regularly. Now I'm almost 52 - change is good.

I have not blogged before, nor does it seem natural to me. I did write long letters to friends and family members when I was younger, a habit I lost when I began using email. I've used email extensively since very early; in 1981 I moved to Munich for a number of years and email was the way to stay connected. The tendency to elaborate verbally has stayed with me - I type fast and haven't switched away from normal-length English words.

I am a long-time nerd according to those who know me. I masquerade as a well-socialized human, but I am irresistibly drawn to technology and geek toys - always have been. I love to drive (or fly, or ski, or sail, or ...); fast machines that handle well are wonderful. Now you know a few of my vulnerabilities. The rest will emerge over time.

Much to my amazement, I have now been working with rainfall and its consequences for almost two decades. 'Not sure how that happened. I have learned a lot, mostly about what I don't know yet.

I look forward to the discussions I might find myself in, should you, dear Reader, choose to converse. Thanks in advance for your interest.

early year musings regarding rainfall

Because of my business, www.OneRain.com, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about rainfall. Lately I spend even more time wishing we had some. It's spring in Colorado along the Front Range of the Rockies and we've gotten a pitiful amount of precipitation so far this year, at least on this side of the Continental Divide.

Our house is in the mountains. We have meadow below and forest above. The main windows face west so we look out at the high country. If you can see the mountains, the mountains can see you and that means wind. It's been windy all winter, such that we started to go nuts with it. When we walk in the forest by my house, the floor is crunchy under our feet. We'll worry about fire this summer.

My thoughts about rainfall have evolved over 20 years as my life has become ever more tightly bound with precipitation. So if you don't care about my personal history with rainfall, stop reading now. I'll write something else next time.

It started out for me as a simple concept: It's either raining or it isn't, right?

Not. It's a form of epistomology - how do you know what you know about rain? How do you know if it's raining behind you when you aren't looking there, or up in the mountains, or across town?

1693
OK, that's easy, put out a rain gage, collect the rainfall and then you'll know! You can measure rainfall by putting out a funnel that collects from a known area into a measuring container.

1974
But what if I'm not able to go out to the rain gage all the time and watch it? OK, use a two-part tipping bucket that fills up one side and tips over its center of gravity whenever it gets 0.01 inches of rainfall. Every time it tips it sends a radio signal, and we just count them to find out how much it rained. So now we know exactly what's going on, right now. Right there, just where the rain gage is.

(1978 - Husband's note to self: Develop custom software that runs on a microprocessor, records radio-transmitted data in real time so we can see what's happening, be able to print out rainfall results displayed on a map. Guess about the rainfall between the rain gages for the purpose of the map. Make sure Big Thompson flood doesn't happen in Boulder County.)

1988 - By the way, there's this new radar network from the National Weather Service called NEXRAD and it lets you see rainfall in the sky across a large area. Who needs rain gages?

1992
So we did rain gages. We started a company, DIAD, and we came up with ways to make automated rain gages more efficient, less expensive and more reliable. We developed processes and tools that are useful for putting in, maintaining and collecting data from rain gages, so we could see what was happening. At the rain gage.

(1994 - Husband's note to self: develop software package that runs in Windows because that's what people will have, records data in real time so we can see what's happening, display data on a map, be able to playback recent storms...save data in relational database for historical purposes. keep guessing about the rain between the gages, help customers mitigate their flood event.)

1994
Um, we still need rain gages. It turns out that: (1) NEXRAD reflects off whatever's out there, including geese, smoke, hail and large immoveable objects, so we're really estimating rainfall based on climate conditions and radar reflectivity, and reflectivity is strongly affected by raindrop size. (2) NEXRAD looks at the sky, but we really care about the consequences of rainfall which means it had to land on the ground somewhere. (3) NEXRAD is finally here, but it gives us the wrong answers sometimes - often - for what we need to know about runoff.

1998
This really smart guy Dave Curtis started a business, NEXRAIN, that used rain gage data to calibrate the NEXRAD rainfall estimates so we could have a much better idea of what rainfall reached the ground. This gives a much better input for runoff models than rain gage data alone, so when Atlanta contemplates rebuilding their sewers they'll know whether they have to spend $1 billion or $2 billion to do the job - it would be bad to plan for the wrong amount!

2003

So let's merge these two companies! Let's make something called OneRain that does all of the above - that's what people really need. Let's offer real-time 24/7 data services so rainfall data consumers get the information they need when and where they need it. We'll put it out on the web, we'll have maps and charts of rainfall, stream responses, weather related to rainfall, and everything.

2005

Note to self: Mergers are fun, and be sure you have the emotional fortitude to do it well!

2006

We still can't measure rainfall very effectively. We go to a great deal of physical and computational trouble to sense and then analyse the results, and there's no way of knowing what really happened so we can test the success of our methods. We can go to Mars with digital video, but it's a bear of a challenge to estimate accurately the rainfall that fell over some particular watershed (or the runoff, but that's yet another problem so don't get me started) .

The good news is I'm not bored yet. Get me a funnel, please. I'm going to put a plexiglass rain gage near the bedroom window so I can look out and see it when I get up in the morning. That way I'll feel better about the fire danger when the gage gets wet.