The Weather Forecasting Forum

I often use digital atmosphere to plot precipitaiton during the previous 24 hours. This is very easy to do for the U.S.

However, I often try to do this for Argentina and Brazil in South America. I download the 1200 UTC observations to do so.

Although it plots the 24-hour max and min temperatures for Brazil and Argentina, it only plots 24-hour precipitaiton for Argentina. For some reason, Brazil is always blank. I've tried downloading different times, and tried plotting 6-hour, 12-hour precipitation. Nothing works. Same problem for Australia.

Anyone have any thoughts? Thanks!

In my experience many countries do not report precipitation.
To check: plot the station plots with precipitation enabled in one of the boxes on the Station Plot Model in the Preferences-Station Plots and that will show if the data is available for that station.
I have found few countries include that data.

Regards Peter

Thanks for your response....

However, I don't think the problem is the lack of worldwide precipitation observations. I have found various websites that do plot this data, specifically for Brazil. Here is a link to an example, this is updated every morning through some type of auto plot: http://www.inmet.gov.br/mapas/Plpti2007030412.gif

Also, I have seen other people plotting precipitation for Australia, and it also appears to be from metar or synop data. But, it doesn't work through Digital Atmosphere. My theories are that

1) DA cannot plot the data, or
2) the data is not metar or snyop, which is why DA is not plotting

Any help or thoughts would be GREATLY appreciated! Thanks!