SWMM - Rain Gages

Rain Gages provide rainfall data for one or more subcatchment areas within a study region. The precipitation data can be a user-defined time series or come from an external file. Several popular rain file formats currently in use are supported, as well as a user-defined default format.

When creating a new rain gage, provide the following properties:

• Identification
  • Description - Use a friendly description when the item name is not enough
  • Name - name of the item
    Avoid names that are too long, or that contain the following characters: '*', '>', '<', '/', '\', '"', ':', ';', '|', '=', '`', '#', ',', '?'
  • Priority - Information about the current state of the item. It might be:
    • Neutral: no problem
    • Critical: Some issue that prevents the item from being calculated or used
• SWMM
  • Rain Data - Rain data source
    It might be:
    • Dat File - provide the file name of rain data
    • Time Series - provide the name of the time series describing the rain gage data
  • Snow Factor - Factor that corrects meter readings for snowfall
  • Precipitation Format - Format in which rainfall data is provided
    It might be:
    • INTENSITY - each rainfall value is an average rate in inches/hour (or mm/hour) over the log interval
    • VOLUME - each rain value is the amount of rain that fell in the recording interval (in inches or millimeters)
    • CUMULATIVE - each precipitation value represents the cumulative precipitation that has occurred since the beginning of the last series of non-zero values (in inches or millimeters)
  • Rainfall Interval - Recording time interval between meter readings
  • Location - Point of Insertion - in SWMM informs the coordinates of the pluviometer
  • Tag - Optional category or classification