The University of the District of Columbia

The University of the District of Columbia

Water Resource Research Institute (WRRI)

Department of Civil Engineering - Hourly Rain Data Parsing Utility



Author: Travis Branham, Junior, Department of Computer Science
Advisor: Dr. Pradeep K. Behera, Ph.D, PE, Department of Civil Engineering

You may download the Ruby source code for this application to run on your own machine.

Here's what you will need:

  1. The Ruby Programming language installed
  2. The program source code, available here.
  3. A method for extracting the source code (currently a tar archive)
  4. Raw NCDC Hourly Rain Data files

If you do not have access to any of the NCDC Hourly Rain Data files, you may still test the application by downloading an example file: two_month_test.txt; please right-click and select 'Save Link As...'.

If you are running Linux or Mac OS X, you may already have everything necessary to run the program; just check your system to ensure that you have Ruby available. If, however, you are running Microsoft Windows, you will need to grab yourself a copy of Ruby. It is suggested by several sources online that you look for "Instant Rails" on the internet.

Once you have the application extracted, take a look at the documentation. The base application provided with this package, called 'rainData.rb', will show you how to use the supplied classes to extract meaningful data from the NCDC files.