How it works
Whether you're the one signing the inspection or the one who has to trust that it happened, here is exactly what runs between a raindrop landing on your site and a signed record in your file — including the parts most tools skip.
Running alongside the six steps below: we read the National Weather Service forecast for each site hourly, and when the forecast total reaches that site’s own trigger within 24 hours the people covering it get one advisory. Active rain-relevant NWS alerts come through the same way. It creates no obligation — the clock below still starts on observed rain — it just means the storm is rarely a surprise.
Search an address or drop a pin. Coordinates outside the continental US are rejected — this is a US-only product and the state drives your legal threshold. State and timezone are derived from the coordinates, and both are mandatory: if the timezone cannot be determined and you do not supply one, creation fails. A deadline computed in the wrong timezone lands on the wrong calendar day.
NOAA Stage IV arrives on its own cadence from NCEP, quality-controlled by the River Forecast Centers. NOAA MRMS arrives near real time — one national grid download serves every site, which is what makes fleet-wide monitoring affordable. Sentinels for "no radar coverage" and "missing" become unavailable. They never become 0.00″.
Every site's rolling 24-hour accumulation is compared against its state permit threshold. The two sources are reconciled by taking the higher — never by averaging, which would invent a number neither source reported. When they disagree, the gap is recorded and shown.
Crossing the threshold moves the event to BREACHED and sends one notification — push and email — with the inspection deadline already computed in the site's local time. The decision to notify is recorded when the event flag flips and delivery is a separate step with retry and backoff, so a mail outage delays your alert instead of losing it.
The inspector opens the state form, prefilled with the storm total and attributed to its
source — "SWRainAlert (NOAA radar)", never a gauge we do not have. Photos and video attach
from the phone, downscaled on device, and queue in an outbox if there is no signal. A
submitted inspection is immutable; a correction is a new record. Filing emails the signed
PDF to the site’s own recipients — the owner, the engineer, the county —
and fires an inspection.filed webhook if you have set one up. The record
commits first, so the mail can never fail the filing.
A complete inspection resolves the event; a draft leaves it BREACHED with the clock still running, because that is the truth. And six hours with no accumulation closes it regardless, so the next storm that day starts from zero and earns its own alert.
What the record contains
Where we draw lines
Two readings stay two readings. The alert uses the higher; the report shows both.
A forecast that did not materialise is not a rain event. Forecast data, where we use it, lives separately and is never mixed into observed precipitation.
When neither source can see a site, we say we have no reading. A site the radar could not observe must never look like a site where it did not rain.
Over your site limit, you cannot add sites. You can still read data, receive alerts, edit thresholds and pull filed inspections.
Product honesty. This is a monitoring and recordkeeping aid, not a compliance guarantee. Where a permit requires an on-site rain gauge, the gauge is the system of record. North Carolina publishes an official inspection form — ours is a working aid, not a substitute for it.
Thirty days of Complete, no card. The next storm is monitored the moment your sites are in.
SWRainAlert