Gaining experience on the use of a video rating scale to observe and report rainfall intensity

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Vivian Juliette Cortes Arevalo, Juan C Chacon-Hurtado, T.A. Bogaard, Leonardo Alfonso, Diogo Galvao

Friday 3 july 2015

11:15 - 11:30h at Europe 2 (level 0)

Themes: (T) Extreme events, natural variability and climate change, (ST) Interaction society and water systems

Parallel session: 15I. Extreme events - Society

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Citizens’ observations require a compromising of data quality and a different approach for data analysis in order to be used as complementary data to regular measurements. We aim at evaluating the quality of data collected using a video rating scale to observe and report rainfall intensity. We considered five indicators for the data quality evaluation: accuracy, precision, completeness, representativeness and comparability. To get first experience with the use of the video rating scale, we carried out a trial experiment with 15 fellow scientists and master students of water science. We used video trials in which we displayed a movie of recorded rainfall and asked participants to rank those using the short (5 seconds) reference rainfall videos. We evaluated accuracy from a frequency analysis of the observations reported. To analyze the precision of the video rating scale, we asked the participants to indicate whether in their perception, the observation was we provided a range in precision by asking observers to select a rating video and specifying if the observation was either lower, similar or higher than a particular level. Simplifications in the rating options using the video scale will be needed. In addition, future experiments should test the video rating scale to report natural rainfall instead video trials. More experiments need to be conducted for increasing the representativeness of data collected.