My Hurricane Harvey Rainfall & Flood Data

Question

I leave in south east Houston, not far from NASA Johnson Space Center. It's been a terrible few days for H-town.

As I sat Su-Tu watching flood waters rise towards my front door, I was constantly monitoring the nearest creek level gage:

Flood/Rain Gage close to my house

I noticed the download to Excel button and downloaded the two files. I've uploaded the JMP datafile. Please take a look and run the Graph Builder script. I have a few questions for the community:

* I tried File > Internet Open. It was a mess (I've not used this feature much in the past). Is it possible to get data directly from this page?
* The rainfall data is hourly. Point for time = t is the rainfall in the hour ending at time = t. Anyone have a better way to visualize Rain.Previous.Hour? I could not find a way to plot 'fat' bars which spanned the whole hour.
* Is there a way to compute a smoothed derivative of Creek.Level? I tried the clunky way with Dif(Creek.Level)*3600/Dif(Date)

Thanks!

My house had a happy ending. Water came within 4" of topping my front door sill 0300 Tu. I was very fortunate. One third of the homes in my town were flooded. Time to go and help those less fortunate.

20170829 1015: view from my front door

Updated 20170907: new file with compelete event data + NOAA hurricane track

My Hurricane Harvey Flooding Friendswood TX.jmp

markschahl · Answer

JMP Family:

You now find yourselves in the same predicament I was in a year ago. Being able to follow a local river/creek gauge during Harvey was very helpful to understand what was going on. Here is a link to one in Raleigh. You should be able to find others close to your homes: Flood Gauge Raleigh, NC

Good luck. Stay dry. See you safe and unscathed @Discovery!

stan_koprowski · Answer

Hi Mark,

I'm glad to hear you survived.  My thoughts and well wishes go out to you and the others impacted by the storm.

If you do a transform on date by day and hour and then nest them I was able to get wider bars for the rain previous hour.

Stan

Hurricane Harvey Rainfall by hour within day

ledi_trutna · Answer

Hi Mark,

Glad to see that the rain has stopped and the water is receding a little bit.

Let me attempt to answer the first question about the internet open. JMP tries to see what data exists on the web page, and your web page contains a lot of data. The one lower down the list that starts with 123 is the creek level, and then below that another one that starts with the date will be the rainfall.  You can't know that unless you import all the selected items and realize which are the important ones to import.  If you import all the highlighted rows, you see that the flood frequency and historical storm tables come in also. The data comes in with no column headers, so you need to enter those yourself.

Given that this website has a handy export to excel option, that would be easier than the internet open for this example.

I'm going to bookmark this web page and track to see how long it takes the creek to get back within its banks.

I'll work on another graph of the rainfall to see if I can find anything different than the presentation you already created.