Checking out where and when rain falls in Rotorua and the Bay of Plenty is now as easy as moving your computer mouse across a screen.
The Bay of Plenty Regional Council has introduced a new feature to its website and by using live monitoring data, a visual representation of the
region's rainfall can now be accessed.
The council's technology and economic development group manager Miles McConway said the feature was just one way in which the regional council was working to make information it collected for monitoring purposes more useful to the general public.
"The information is vital to our day to day business. However, it's the additional ways in which it can be used that we're also interested to know," Mr McConway said.
"We're sure it has greater value to be leveraged from it by the wider community, be that in economic, social, cultural or environmental uses."
The regional council's data services manager, Glenn Ellery, said it was great to be able to present data they get from the monitoring stations in a visual, meaningful way.
"Whether it's a school pupil doing an assignment, or a farmer wanting to look at rainfall patterns across a set period we hope this enhancement will enable them to use and analyse the information as they need to," Mr Ellery said.
The map also displays information about where each month's rainfall data fits against the monthly or annual average for each monitoring site.
"We're excited about this development and hope to be able to extend this type of visual reporting to other areas of our monitoring data.
"We're also interested to hear from people who use this information and find out what they use it for, as we may be able to present other data we collect in a similarly useful manner."
The Bay of Plenty Regional Council's live monitoring information includes rainfall, river level, air quality and coastal wave information. It can be accessed by visiting www.envbop.govt.nz and following the link to live monitoring in the quick links section on the home page.
