rained.cloud

The Notebooks

Somewhere in rural Australia, a farmer has been writing down the rain. Every morning for forty years — the same walk to the gauge, the same pencil, the same ruled notebook. The numbers are small and precise: 3.2mm. 0.0. 14.5. Trace.

This isn’t unusual. Across the country, thousands of landholders maintain private rainfall records that never reach the Bureau of Meteorology’s database. The Bureau tracks official stations — roughly 7,000 of them — but the gaps between stations can span hundreds of kilometres. In those gaps, the only climate record that exists is handwritten, private, and increasingly fragile.

The notebooks in question had survived droughts, floods, shed relocations, and mice. They would not survive indefinitely. The paper was yellowing. The ink was fading. Some entries were already illegible. Forty years of daily observations — the kind of continuous, location-specific record that climate researchers would pay for — was slowly disappearing.

rained.cloud began as a straightforward act of preservation: digitise the notebooks before they’re gone. It became something larger.

What Forty Years Looks Like

Once the data was digital, patterns emerged that were invisible in the notebooks. A dry spell in 1994 that felt catastrophic at the time turned out to be unremarkable compared to 1982. The “good years” of the early 2000s were genuinely anomalous — 30% above the long-term mean. The last decade’s rainfall, which felt normal, was actually tracking below every prior decade on record.

This is the value of long-term data: it corrects memory. Farmers make decisions based on what they remember, and what they remember is biased toward the recent and the dramatic. A forty-year dataset doesn’t have those biases.

DIGITISED RAINFALL RECORD (sample station, annual totals)

Year    mm      Decile    ██████████████████████████████████████
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
1984    523     D3        ████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
1988    412     D1        █████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
1992    687     D5        █████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
1996    845     D8        █████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
2000    921     D9        ██████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
2004    756     D7        ██████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
2008    612     D4        ███████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
2012    543     D3        █████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
2016    478     D2        ████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
2020    502     D2        ████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
2024    561     D3        █████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
        Deciles calculated to BOM standards

The Bureau of Meteorology’s decile system — ranking each period against the full historical record — only works with enough history. The standard minimum is thirty years. Most private stations don’t have that. This one does.

Eight Platforms, One Gauge

The recording problem is straightforward: you need to make it so easy to enter a reading that it happens every day without fail. Miss a day and the record has a hole. Miss a week and the monthly total is unreliable. Miss a month and the year is compromised.

rained.cloud solves this with aggressive multi-platform coverage. The same observation can be entered from:

• A mobile app (iOS, Android) with offline support and GPS tagging
• A web dashboard (Next.js) with interactive charts and station management
• A voice command via Google Home — “Hey Google, record 4.2 millimetres”
• A WearOS app for smartwatch entry at the gauge
• Desktop apps for macOS, Linux, and Windows via Flutter

Every platform syncs to the same PostgreSQL database via Supabase. Conflict resolution handles the inevitable case where someone records on their phone and their partner records on the web. Background sync handles connectivity gaps — common in rural areas where mobile coverage is intermittent at best.

PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE

  Mobile (Flutter)     Web (Next.js)     Voice (Google Home)
       │                    │                    │
       └────────┬───────────┘────────────────────┘
                │
         Supabase (Auth + Realtime)
                │
         PostgreSQL + PostGIS + TimescaleDB
                │
         FastAPI (Analytics + BOM Deciles)
                │
         Azure (CI/CD + Static + API)

The QR code setup at m.rained.cloud means configuring a new device takes seconds — scan, authenticate, start recording. This matters when the target user is a farmer, not a developer.

The Decile Engine

Raw rainfall numbers are useful. Contextualised rainfall numbers are transformative.

rained.cloud calculates rainfall deciles to the Bureau of Meteorology’s exact standard — the same methodology used in official drought declarations. A decile ranking tells you where a given period sits relative to the entire historical record: Decile 1 means the lowest 10% on record. Decile 10 means the highest.

When a farmer sees their current quarter is Decile 2, they’re not guessing about whether it’s been dry. They know — empirically, against a century of data — that it’s been drier than 80% of all recorded history. That changes decisions.

The analytics layer combines private station data with government records where available, creating a merged view that neither source could provide alone. A farm with forty years of private records can compare against the nearest BOM station’s hundred-year dataset. The correlation analysis reveals how representative — or how different — the farm’s microclimate actually is.

Privacy and Ownership

Not every landowner wants their rainfall data public. Some consider it commercially sensitive — a better-than-average rainfall profile adds value to a property. Others simply prefer privacy.

rained.cloud offers both public and private stations. Private data is encrypted and inaccessible to anyone without explicit access grants. Public stations contribute to a growing national dataset that fills the gaps between official BOM stations.

The workspace model supports multiple stations per user, with granular sharing controls. A farming family might keep their home station private but share a community gauge’s data publicly. A research institution might aggregate multiple private stations with landowner consent.

What’s Preserved

The original notebooks aren’t going back into the shed. But the data they contained — forty years of a single location’s relationship with rain — is now permanent, queryable, and contextualised against a century of national records.

More importantly, the system prevents future loss. Every reading entered today becomes part of a record that will outlast the paper it would otherwise have been written on. The infrastructure investment is in the data’s permanence, not just its capture.

For the farmer who started writing numbers in a notebook four decades ago, the platform does exactly what they were already doing. It just does it in a way that lasts.

rained.cloud is live at app.rained.cloud. Contact rained@drksci.com for partnership or data access.