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Show HN: XRain – Explore rainfall statistics around the world (xrain.info)

114 points by cameronoliver ↗ HN
Last year I launched a website that allow people to see rainfall statistics that are based on satellite data. Historical rainfall information usually comes from rain gauges, and while these are fantastic there are many parts of the world that don't have many long term gauges, or where that data is hard to access. Satellite data can be an invaluable source of information for those data-scarce areas.

The business model is to sell "extreme precipitation" data that can be used for flood modelling. Unfortunately, after a year I still haven't made a single sale. I've tried various ways of advertising, mainly via messaging people on LinkedIn who would actually have a use for it. I'm still proud of what I've built, even if it's a flop!

The tech stack is SolidJS with a Django API backend.

Fun feature: jump to a completely random part of the world by clicking the "Random" button.

I'd love feedback on anything, such as how to improve the UI/UX of the mobile view of the map page.

44 comments

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chad_oliver
I've watched this being built and it's been really cool seeing how well SolidJS works. I was initially dubious ("No one gets fired for picking React", right?) but it seems like it made for really easy development.

How hard would it be to add a choropleth view showing metrics such as 1-year 24-hour depth across the globe?

cameronoliver
Thanks! Chloropeths of extreme depths in the map page is a good idea actually.
phillipseamore
I'm used to working with GloFAS, GloH2O, ERA5 and local re-anlysis. Is there anything that XRain does better? Is your customer base simply comfortable with working with IMERG data directly (or the products I mentioned above)?
cameronoliver
I used IMERG because it's historical satellite measurements, not re-analysis using a model.

The focus was on creating extreme precipitation stats at a global scale, something that wasn't previously available. Many potential customers wouldn't even be aware of GloH20, ERA5, etc.

halfeatenpie
Don't sell your potential customers too short. We've outsourced analysis to be done with ERA5 dataset to an external vendor. There are many who know what to do and can do it themselves, but would rather outsource for liability reasons.
arcade79
So... today I learned that I live at .. 60N. Tiles are available 10km to the south of me, but not where I live. :P
cameronoliver
Oh! I've had to be careful to avoid saying it's available "anywhere", because there are certainly people like you who live above 60°N or below 60°S.
arcade79
Missing most of the Nordics (most of Norway/Sweden, all of Finland and Iceland) .. is probably what you'll get the most complaints about with regards to this.
msaharia
The UI is fantastic . I don't think there is anything wrong with the website. The reason you are not making a sale has probably nothing to do with UI. I think you should concentrate on sales and filling an important gap in user requirement. Who needs this data? There are already many websites where you can get extreme precipitation data for free.

P.S. I am a hydroclimate scientist/professor. Happy to discuss further.

Edit - Looks like we have almost the same background in academics. :)

cameronoliver
Yes, I've been focused on sales only for a number of months.

XRain is mostly designed to help in situations where data (free or otherwise) isn't available from anywhere else.

However I've come to realise that most places have some sort of data that they use and are familiar with, even if that data isn't very good. As a result people/companies haven't been very willing to part with their cash.

msaharia
Exactly - I can tell you an example from India. India has the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) precipitation dataset. Even if your estimates are more accurate, no company will use your dataset to design/validate a civil engineering design. This has to do with liability of using a dataset from a "non-official" source. Right now, you are stuck in the middle where it is not viable for non-US companies to use it, while US companies will mostly rely on NOAA Atlas. If this is to become a public-facing product, then the current pricing is too high, and might have to develop an alternative business model. Maybe people are interested in checking the floodplain zonation/xrain before buying a house, for example. But no SAAS in that case.

How flexible is your codebase to incorporate regional datasets? I think you will have to regional merging.

What are your current costs of running the setup? Any possibility/plans of white-labeling the codebase?

cameronoliver
You're probably right, at least for a decent chunk of the world.

Regional merging would be valuable, but compiling a comprehensive set of high-resolution (sub-daily) rainfall data might be quite hard.

Hosting costs are reasonably low. What do you have in mind with respect to white labelling? (what use cases were you thinking?)

joahua
Policy impediments to use are real! Your data gap-filler approach is interesting though.

Along this line… occasionally there is official but obviously-wrong data from even WMO accredited providers whose automatic weather stations ('AWS') are busted. Perhaps your approach would help provide a widely validated bound-check? The trouble is often that kind of undetected, obviously-wrong data, is also a symptom of 'we have no money to fix it'…

xrd
When I was looking at purchasing a house in the Portland area, I wanted to know the sunlight per day over a year (the house was on a hill). There was a Swedish company that had an interesting service which would generate a sunlight report. I paid for it, about $20 if I recall correctly. The conversation here about people using this to determine flooding before purchasing a house seems similar.
zorm
You buried a lot of great analysis in your white paper that is hard to find! The comparison to NOAA Atlas 14 really shows what to expect with this dataset and how to better use it.

My guess is that potential customers who know how to use this data with their flood model also know how to derive this data from the sources. You may need to compute inundation maps for X year return periods in order to reach customers who need this information but don't know how to use flood models.

Really nice website and backend though! It's so fast even given the volume of data. Very impressive

cameronoliver
Thanks. I'll have a think about how I can make those comparison plots easier to find.

Yep, inundation mapping would certainly be useful to a much wider number of people. I'll have to look into the existing competition and work out whether there's space in the market for another player.

gitgud
> I'd love feedback on anything, such as how to improve the UI/UX of the mobile view of the map page.

Looks great, the UI is snappy and impressively fast.

One thing I would suggest is defaulting to the “Mean annual depth” background, as I’m viewing a rainfall specific website and would expect to see that.

You could also update the URL with the map state, like [1] Windy does on their site (and google maps)

[1] https://www.windy.com/-Rain-accumulation-rainAccu?rainAccu,n...

cameronoliver
I've changed the map so that it plots annual depth by default now.
voxelghost
What I miss most is a legend on the map when choosing to view by rainfall depth.

Btw, using the term "depth" for amount of rain sounds very unnatural to me, but English is not my first language - and I can see that it is used in literature.

Finally the selection of "extreme" vs "seasonal" in the popup when clicking the map feels a bit redundant since the choice is available via tab in the statistics page that opens next.

Maybe add another option to map color background schemes extreme/seasonal, and then make this the default when clicking locations.

Tade0
This is really well made and confirmed a longstanding suspicion of mine that in the region where most of my family lives it's absolutely pouring compared to the rest of the country.

Would it be possible to add isohyetal lines for the depth map? That would make it much easier to read it, considering that the colour contrast isn't particularly high there so a legend wouldn't really help.

dotancohen
Very nice site.

I encountered a bug while the "Look up monthly and annual statistics" popup was showing. Without closing the popup, I clicked "Seasonal data" button. That opened up the "Precipitation Statistics page" with the "Look up monthly and annual statistics" popup still overlayed and the page grey. The popup buttons still worked (I could press Next to get the "Get statistics for modeling floods" text), but closing the popup resulted in the page remaining grey.

Firefox 117 on Kubuntu 22.04.

cameronoliver
Thanks for letting me know—I've fixed that bug now.
alkaloids
This is quite nice - the biggest quality of life improvement on it for me would be to take that monthly totals from the "seasonal" button and make a little sparkline with it to put in that initial box (where you are only showing the mean annual depth)
gausswho
Two suggestions that I think would ease exploration:

I'd like to see some representation of rainfall on the top level map to help discover interesting areas to drill into more detail.

The pop up to choose between seasonal/extreme feels unnecessary when I can select the corresponding tab on the subequent page.

cameronoliver
Thanks—I've changed the map so that it plots annual depth by default now. Yes I agree the popup is "unnecessary", but I wanted to make it easy for the site to be used for extreme stats without having to wade through seasonal stats first.
hagfjall
I would love for it to have a map/filter similar to shademap.app/. Meaning that I can select a timeframe (say may-july) and then browse around the world to see the rain amount during this period for different places.

Reason for me would be to see different rainfall statistics easily on the map, not for flooding but more for deciding where to live.

Great website!

NKosmatos
Wow, really nice and fast website. One small improvement would be to export the rain data for a location in actual CSV. What you have now is something mixed, sort of txt, csv and xls combined :-)

I can understand your frustration for failing to monetize this nicely implemented idea. It’s a shame because the site is polished, the information is displayed clearly and the overall feel of it is good. Perhaps it has to do with a very small market you’re targeting. You could add extreme weather reports (or something else you can think of) so as to attract a broader audience.

davidw
I'm not your target market, so don't worry too much what I think, but when I zoom in on Oregon, I don't get a good sense for the sharp contrast in rainfall across the state.
oooyay
What view were you looking at? I was able to find this page: https://xrain.info/data/4878573/seasonal. Oddly, the selection box does seem to indicate I don't live in Portland, which the annexation ten years back would be furious about :)
davidw
I was just looking at the map.
doodlebugging
You are seeing the rain shadow effect if you are wondering why there seems to be higher rainfall in western Oregon compared to eastern Oregon. [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow

davidw
My point is that his map doesn't do a good job of showing that, when rainfall differences are pretty dramatic. Something like this shows it much more clearly:

https://www.eldoradoweather.com/climate/us-states/oregon-ave...

As well as regional differences like the Wallowas vs SE Oregon.

doodlebugging
I agree that the effect is a lot more subtle because of the color scale employed. The absence of a legend also impairs interpretability.
statguy
Cam here to say the same thing, the map appears to be overly smoothed and does not capture the sharp rainfall changes that often occur due to the local topography - e.g. when going from the windward side of a mountain to the leeward side.

For example, according to the map the rainfall at world's wettest place Mawsynram, is about 4300mm, which is about 35% of the the actual. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mawsynram

rconti
I think parent is saying they DON'T see the rain shadow. I think it's perhaps a problem of opacity when you use the "mean annual depth" background layer. It's visible, but subtle.
doodlebugging
I see what they are saying now. The use of the blue color bar tends to wash it out so it isn't as useful to "flood" the map view with blue water for this display as it would be if you changed to a color bar with other gradations that would allow the user to see at a glance that eastern Oregon is dry relative to coastal Oregon. A legend would also help.
dylan604
Forcing someone to accept Terms & Conditions before even seeing what the website does is a huuuuuge blocker. I closed the tab. If you're selling the product, you can have someone agree to T&C at time of sale. If you can't even demo the product for sale without some agreement to an online contract, then I'd suggest your demo is flawed.
halfeatenpie
Water Resources Engineering PhD (focus on climate change) and now in consulting for F100 companies. I'm probably the type of people you're looking to pay for this.

I love this as a product. I've used similar products/competitors that are much more feature rich and at my consulting firm we have our own group of internal tooling that pretty much does very similar things but we don't have to pay or outsource to another entity.

If I may add a few points of suggestions.

1. I need to understand the level of uncertainty this methodology brings or else it's not really useful for me.

2. The pricing is not competitive. You're asking someone to pay for an analysis that's freely available or with "lower grade of data". Most places want higher number of sites to understand what the level of risk is. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be "good enough" to make decisions (the pareto front problem). Your product looks cool but isn't answering the "why pay for it when I can get a good enough solution for free" argument. Unless your methodology is really compelling and/or is peer reviewed, it's going to be hard for us to justify paying for this product. If I'm going to pay for a flood analysis, I'm not going to pay for extreme precipitation but I'd rather pay (or do pay) https://fathom.global and Paul Bates' people for their flood data directly.

3. Climate Change is a major factor and it's impacting many larger organization's decision process. The White Paper glosses over climate change as follow guidance from IPCC Atlas. If you can include AR6 projections and show the relative change/difference or something more on top of this then I can see more of a reason to use the product. But if it's just an extreme precipitation analysis with no climate change (or hand-wavy climate change), it's hard for us to justify the charge.

I have a lot more suggestions but these are the top 3 that I can recommend.

I'm interested in hearing how this product continues to mature and grow! This is pretty cool.

doodlebugging
Nice site.

I have measured my rainfall for more than 20 years using a rain gauge and when I check the Mean Annual Depth for my location I can see that the satellite measurements are within 0.4" (10.2mm) of my measured mean annual totals. The satellite data suggests a larger amount than that actually measured but I know that the area of the calculation is pretty large, about 50 sq miles whereas my data comes from a single point source within that rectangle.

I notice that your stats come from the time period 2001-2020. Mine cover 2002-2022. Is it possible for you to add the more recent data from 2021-2022? I have found that the long-term mean appears to be increasing for my area of North Texas (climate change is giving my area more rainfall). Data that I have from the period 1981-2010 shows mean total that is 1.7" (43.2mm) lower than that from my own measurements for the time period 2011-2020.

It may be worth considering using current data as a flash flood likelihood tool. Use drought monitoring data combined with projected rainfall as a predictive tool for flash floods.

Areas that are in drought may be more flood-prone due to vegetation loss and the first rain that falls can quickly trigger flash flooding if the rain event is a heavy downpour. It takes time to wet the surface enough to capture rainfall instead of having it all run off.

Another predictive tool could be for flash flooding or landslide probability using drought and wildfire data as a predictive tool. That would be a value-add for your customers.

At my location we are in an extreme drought. As of today we are 14.4" (365.8mm) below the 21 year mean accumulated rainfall for this calendar date. We ended last year with a 13.5" (342.9mm) deficit relative to the 21 year mean annual total. Last year was the second driest year in the last 21 years and at this point in time we are 1.4" (35.6mm) under the accumulation relative to this date last year. I have not noticed the beneficial effects of the El Nino so far but my data indicates that we will likely end next year well above normal accumulation if the El Nino holds. El Nino years tend to give us 120 - 200% of our mean annual accumulation during the first year and then tail off into the next La Nina.

Good site. I like this.

codingdave
Is it possible that you aren't making sales because the data is not unique? It took me about 30 seconds of searching to find 3 other sources for historical precipitation data.