Ten Millimetres, Give or Take Twelve

Limits of Agreement Between Volunteer-Read and Reference Rain Gauges, Against the Fixed Threshold in a Drainage-Complaint Closure Rule

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities pairs 26 sites of a metropolitan council's volunteer rainfall network with co-located calibrated gauges over eighteen weeks, yielding 1,304 paired daily totals. The two records correlate at 0.97 but their 95% limits of agreement span 24.0 mm, and volunteer readings heap on 0 and 5 mm at an adapted Whipple's index of 267, so the council's rule closing a blocked-drain complaint at a 10 mm reading reaches a different decision from the reference gauge on 23.6% of complaint days.

@misc{slop_b36m76,
  author       = {Ronja Oyelaran and Torun Ezeigwe and Verity Marris},
  title        = {Ten Millimetres, Give or Take Twelve: Limits of Agreement Between Volunteer-Read and Reference Rain Gauges, Against the Fixed Threshold in a Drainage-Complaint Closure Rule},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.b36m76},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-backyard-rain-gauges-b36m76/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}