CATCH: Subcatchments Precipitation Accumulation

CATCH calculates the precipitation accumulation in subcatchment areas such as watershed areas.

CATCH is used for hydrometeorological applications such as estimating the total rainfall in a river basin for the purpose of flood forecasting. Both the time of the integration and the subcatchment areas can be selected.

CATCH can also issue warnings if the precipitation in a subcatchment region exceeds a threshold value.

CATCH is a product of a product for which the hourly RAIN1 product serves as the input. You can sum any number of hours of individual RAIN1 products. The only limitation is the number of RAIN1 products stored on disk. As part of the IRIS Hydromet option, the RAIN1 products can be calibrated by means of raingage input, thus CATCH products also get the benefit of this calibration.

The subcatchment areas are defined similarly to overlays, that is, subcatchment regions are defined by using LAT/LON vector points and stored in a file in the IRIS_OVERLAY directory.

A "catch" file typically contains many subcatchment areas. There can be more than one catch file so that users can have different "mixes" of subcatchments.

The output of the CATCH product is a file that contains the precipitation depth for each subcatchment for each hour and the total over the selected integration time. This file can be displayed by itself or overlaid on another product display. An interactive bar graph display shows the hourly precipitation amounts in each subcatchment.