Dominican Republic Data Rescue
Upper air and rainfall data
Status: Stalled
Observations Rescued
The National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NHMS) in the Dominican Republic has many types of data including rainfall and upper air data. In 2002, IEDRO volunteers and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service personnel worked for several months with the NMHS to retrieve numerous historic weather observations which were digitized by NOAA.
Unfortunately, personnel and funding changes at NMHS prevented the program from moving forward. This has left rainfall strip charts at risk. Despite these challenges, the NMHS began manually digitizing the surface precipitation data from the original strip charts. While important work, by digitizing the data without imaging it first means no electronic copy of the original data is retained and the digitized data cannot be validated in the future.
IEDRO’s Data Rescue and Digitization programs always image the data first so that the original document is preserved in case the paper forms are destroyed or discarded.
Country involved
Dominican Republic
Contact on Site
Ing. Gloria M. Ceballos G. (Natl. Director) and Ms. Caridad Perez
Contact in IEDRO
Dr. Rick Crouthamel
Funding Sources
NOAA
Project Status
stalled
Data Rescued
21,000 upper air observations
What are our plans for the future?
With sufficient funding and local interest, IEDRO would provide scanners and on-site training to image surface data from the original paper charts. IEDRO would also need to develop a program that recognizes the Dominican Republic’s unique strip chart format to automatically digitize the data provided by the Dominican Republic scanners.
