Of all the weather variables, accurate rainfall is the most important, above all others, in determining what decisions to make on the field. Agronomists and growers alike leverage this information for irrigation budgets, disease and pest modeling, yield monitoring, planting, and harvesting information. Yet, everyone accustomed to seeing rainfall products from precision farming applications vary by upwards of one inch.

The Ag sector no longer has to settle for such inaccuracies:

Weather Decision Technologies (WDT) has pioneered and brought to market, the largest jump in accuracy of field level rainfall in the agriculture market to date. Patented dual polarization (dual pol) radar algorithms allows WDT to perform the precipitation rate calculation at each point specific to the type of precipitation detected there (rain, hail, snow, etc.) instead of treating everything as rain like past radar products. Over the spring and summer, WDT has been comparing radar derived precipitation to physical gauge locations, amassing over 500,000 comparisons of the lat lon location of QC’d rain gauges to the dual pol radar product. The root mean square error, the measure of total predictive error, of this study shows rainfall accuracy down a tenth of an inch accuracy, better than any other product on the market today. Combined with WDT’s gauge correction algorithm, this product’s accuracy is enhanced even further.

Figure 1: 250m dual polarization correctly captures 7 inch rainfall that flooded Austin, TX compared to traditional non dual pol methods. Bias improvements of over 75% was seen in this case study for heavy rainfall. 

WDT is launching the industry’s first 250m resolution dual polarization rainfall products across the US (Figure 1 above). At 250m, you are at 17 acre grid squares compared to 256 acres that’s offered by our competitors at 1km. Combined with the dual polarization’s rainfall accuracy improvements, WDT will be providing to precision agriculture the highest resolution, most accurate rainfall product to date. Contact WDT to request a free trial and learn more about dual pols accuracy statistics and how it can help you extend your margins and increase your yield.