Input data acquisition and preprocessing is time-consuming and difficult to handle and can have major implications on environmental modeling results. US EPA's Hydrological Micro Services Precipitation Comparison and Analysis Tool (HMS-PCAT) provides a publicly available tool to accomplish this critical task. We present HMS-PCAT's software design and its use in gathering, preprocessing, and evaluating precipitation data through web services. This tool simplifies catchment and point-based data retrieval by automating temporal and spatial aggregations. In a demonstration of the tool, four gridded precipitation datasets (NLDAS, GLDAS, DAYMET, PRISM) and one set of gauge data (NCEI) were retrieved for 17 regions in the United States and evaluated on 1) how well each dataset captured extreme events and 2) how datasets varied by region. HMS-PCAT facilitates data visualizations, comparisons, and statistics by showing the variability between datasets and allows users to explore the data when selecting precipitation datasets for an environmental modeling application.

中文翻译：

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演示包含降水数据自动检索和比较的在线网络服务工具。


输入数据采集和预处理非常耗时且难以处理，并且可能对环境建模结果产生重大影响。美国 EPA 的水文微服务降水比较和分析工具 (HMS-PCAT) 提供了一个公开可用的工具来完成这项关键任务。我们介绍 HMS-PCAT 的软件设计及其在通过 Web 服务收集、预处理和评估降水数据方面的用途。该工具通过自动化时间和空间聚合来简化流域和基于点的数据检索。在该工具的演示中，检索了美国 17 个地区的四个网格降水数据集（NLDAS、GLDAS、DAYMET、PRISM）和一组仪表数据 (NCEI)，并针对以下方面进行了评估：1) 每个数据集捕获极端事件的效果如何2) 数据集如何因地区而异。 HMS-PCAT 通过显示数据集之间的变异性来促进数据可视化、比较和统计，并允许用户在为环境建模应用程序选择降水数据集时探索数据。