How much rain actually fell here?
Raindex tracks rainfall for the places you save — your yard, a field, a job site — from NOAA’s radar and rain-gauge network on a 1 km grid. Totals over the last 1 to 72 hours, a day-by-day history, and an alert when a place passes the amount you care about. It is an estimate for the kilometre your place sits in, and it says so on every reading.
iPhone · United States coverage · no ads, no advertising identifiers
Your kilometre, not your city
Rainfall is read for the 1 km cell your place sits in, not averaged across a whole town. Fields a mile apart often fall in different cells, and Raindex shows each one separately.
History that stays put
A day-by-day calendar going back to when you added the place. A missing hour shows as missing, never as zero, so an outage can never masquerade as a dry day.
Told what it can't know
Every reading is labelled gauge-adjusted, radar only, or provisional. No accuracy score, because a radar estimate cannot honestly support one.
Why your rain gauge and a rainfall app disagree
It is the most common complaint in this whole category, and it usually is not a bug. Weather radar estimates rainfall from a beam passing hundreds of metres above your property; a gauge catches what lands in a funnel a few inches across. Rainfall varies inside a single kilometre. Gauges under-catch in wind. And the gauge-corrected figure arrives about an hour and a half after the rain does, so an early number is revised.
Most apps in this category answer that question in a support FAQ, if at all. Raindex answers it on the reading itself.
Where these numbers come from
- What Raindex measures
- Raindex measures observed rainfall from NOAA’s Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor system (MRMS) at roughly 1 km resolution, combining radar estimates with rain-gauge adjustment. The gauge-corrected pass runs about 97 minutes behind real time, so a recent total can be revised upward or downward as gauge data arrives.
- What neither one can tell you
- A 30-year average says nothing about this week. A radar estimate is still an estimate: it can disagree with the gauge in your yard because of terrain, the height of the radar beam over your property, how rainfall varies within a single kilometre, and the fact that a gauge itself under-catches in wind. Raindex labels each reading gauge-adjusted, radar only or provisional so you can see which you are looking at. It does not publish an accuracy percentage, because that is not a number this data can honestly support.
Measure the rain where it matters to you
Save a location and Raindex keeps its rainfall history from that day forward.