Many of you know I work for WeatherBug as a meteorologist for the Media department. WeatherBug has established weather stations at schools, businesses, and emergency management buildings. One of the main benefits to meteorologists in using WeatherBug data compared to National Weather Service (NWS) data is our data is real-time, updating every two seconds. The NWS data could be up to an hour old and they don’t have as dense a network as WeatherBug.

As you may imagine, explaining to viewers what is happening (“nowcasting”) is difficult with data that could be old. With WeatherBug data, our partners are able to go into the neighborhoods where people live to show the conditions as the weather changes.

This afternoon around 4:00pm, the NWS site at Washington-Dulles (KIAD) reported 0.43″ of rain, which is indicative of the weather for the airport. However, localized thunderstorms only seven miles away dumped over 5″ of rain (now at 6.07″) at one of our WeatherBug sites in Reston, VA. I was able to follow the radar and actually see the rain amounts increase as it was happening. Meteorologists, with this real-time data, are able to warn viewers faster than with the NWS data alone. In Reston, there were many reports of flash flooding and even some water rescues of motorists who got stranded in high water.

The rain will slow tonight and mostly end by the weekend, but the damage has been done. WeatherBug sites up and down the east coast, already water-logged by Irene, have seen record flood stages. Wilkes-Barre, PA evacuated 65,000 residents after river levels were forecast to reach just below record flood stages (set during Hurricane Agnes in 1972). Unfortunately, we’ll be talking about this flooding for the next several days and weeks to come.