In the urban environment, how water flows during and following rain and snowmelt precipitation events puts higher volumes of water and more pollutants into our local rivers and lakes, in addition to causing flooding and erosion. Having the tools to monitor, understand and report on storm water runoff are important. Monitoring includes measuring, testing the water quality, predicting storm water flows, measuring those flows.

State-of-the-art storm sewer analyses utilize detailed computer models to evaluate storm sewer performance. One of the big unknowns in the modeling process is measuring the distribution of rainfall over a watershed.