Monday, December 29, 2014

A Styled Version Of The Rain Table For Modesto

I've been kind of embarrassed by the rough nature of the rainfall tables I've posted here as a part of my rainfall database project, so I spent a little time making the thing more attractive.

MODESTO Percent of Normal Rainfall

Date20142013
21-Dec-1421842
22-Dec-1421341
23-Dec-1420940
24-Dec-1420440
25-Dec-1420039
26-Dec-1419738
27-Dec-1419337
28-Dec-1419037

Speaking of rain, I checked out the forecast for California for the upcoming week, and it doesn't look so good. Dry weather as far as the eye can see for most of the state. That 2014 percent of normal number is going to keep falling.

A recap of how this project works


  • Ubuntu server running as a virtual machine under Win7 using the free VMWare Player.
  • PHP script running as a root cron job at 1230 every day, harvesting data by scraping this page using the simple_html_dom PHP library.
  • MySQL database with two tables, city name and percent of normal, data injected from the aforementioned PHP scraper script.
  • PHP scripting on a local Dreamweaver site running on the aforementioned Ubuntu virtual server to extract the data from the database and format it as a table.

2 comments:

tim eisele said...

Since I'm not at all familiar with the normal amount of rainfall in Modesto in December, just how wet (or dry) are we talking about here? Is this a case of normally getting, say, 12 inches per month and having it jump up to 24 (which would be quite a soaking), or is it more like a quarter of an inch increasing to half an inch (which might not even be all that noticeable without careful data collection)?

(if we got a 200% increase in precipitation in Houghton, it would be quite a disaster between the flooding and the buildings collapsing from the snow load)

K T Cat said...

Modesto has received 7.7 inches since July 1st of this year. An inch of rain would be about 30 percent of normal for year to date. I don't know why the rain year starts on July 1st. Some agricultural reason, perhaps?