Days of Rain Map

Overview

This handy panel gives you an idea of rain accumulation over a selected time period (the default is one week). Quickly grasp how long ongoing rain has been occurring across the country, which helps seasonal and outdoor businesses stay nimble with order writing, sales and more.

Options & Usage

Weather insights have slightly different options than many of the sales panels due to the nature of the data.  We collect rain and temperature data based on morning, evening or the entire day.  The first option defaults Day/Anytime, but you can select it to focus on morning or evening readings if you like.  The second option is the most common option to trip people up - % Chance of precipitation.  When viewing weather data in aggregation over a geography weather services work from the "Likelihood" of rain over the area forecasted. This is done because rain can be highly localized to within a mile or two - so aggregation occurs to give you the chance that 100% of the area forecasted will receive rain.   So a 50% chance or precipitation really means their is a 50% chance the entire area will receive rainfall.

In reality this means that % chances of precipitation in ranges 50% and up mean its quite likely to rain.  Chances above 66% are near certain rainfall.   We aggregate these values over the county level by day to populate the map shown.

Show Vs. Prior Year - This can be helpful when you are trying to see whether it was more rainy than the same time period in the prior year. When looking at sales comps, understanding whether its more rainy vs the same time overlays naturally with comp sales numbers. 

Time Period  - The time period can be set to any range you like - though keep in mind that longer term weather trends tend to mean revert, so choosing time periods in excess of 30-90 days is going to produce mostly meaningless data.  The best time period analysis for this are shorter periods of one week to one month at a time.  For this reason we created the legend to max out at >20 days of rain.

Save Zoom/Pan State - As with all maps, you can zoom into a particular area of the country then click the gear and choose "Yes" here to save the zoomed state of the panel for future refreshes.  This is helpful if you only are concerned with a specific region.