iRain Mobile App: Using Citizen Science to Support Water Management

A new mobile app has been designed to help monitor the impacts of climate on the water cycle. The iRain mobile app utilizes citizen science via crowd-soured data to track precipitation globally. iRain is available for iOS or Android devices. You can find the mobile app on iTunes or in the Google Play store.

iRain has been created to serve as a mobile version of the web-based iRain tool (http://irain.eng.uci.edu/) developed by the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS) at the University of California – Irvine, directed by Dr. Soroosh Sorooshian, with support from a broad range of partners, including USACE IWR-ICIWaRM and UNESCO. It is designed to facilitate the collection of real-time global satellite precipitation observations, allowing its users to track rainfall events all over the globe. This can be particularly useful in regards to emergency planning, to warn and inform individuals of dangerous hydrological events. The data are gathered via the PERSIANN-CCS system, which has been under development for two decades. Users can also use the crowdsourcing functionality of the app to report their local rainfall information to supplement our data. For researchers, these data are useful as it provides a convenient and user-friendly mobile means of accessing the data that is currently available on the web version of iRain.