In 2005, the State Climate Office of North Carolina at NC State University (SCO) was funded by DOT to develop a web-based alert and monitoring tool to visualize radar-based precipitation estimates over the Carolinas. This tool utilizes gridded precipitation estimates produced by the National Weather Service (NWS) combined with MapServer technology to display accumulated precipitation is a GIS environment. The NWS precipitation grids combine the spatial resolution of radar-based estimates with the accuracy of ground-based gages, providing the most accurate local-scale hourly precipitation information that is operationally available. In 2006, the SCO was funded by DOT to maintain and enhance the product through June 2009. As part of this phase, dedicated computing servers were installed to provide load balancing and service redundancy. In 2009-June 2010, the SCO was funded to continue maintenance and develop new enhancements including text message alerts, precipitation estimates statistics over a drawn polygon area, and changes to the user permissions of monitoring sites. This proposal will continue maintenance of the current DOT Precipitation Alert tool and develop new enhancements that enable more efficient use of the tool.
