A library to generate synthetic precipitation data

A critical issue in biophysical modeling projects is to develop a set of reusable libraries to support the development of future applications. This is true for weather modeling as well. Rain is a software component providing a collection of stochastic approaches to generate precipitation data on daily and subdaily time steps. Synthetic data generated on a daily time step consists of precipitation occurrence and amount. Subdaily generation includes time of peak, peak intensity, storm arrival, and duration. The software design allows for extension of the models implemented without recompiling the component. The component, inclusive of a hypertext help file and of documentation generated from source code comments, has been released as compiled NET and Java versions, allowing application development in either programming environment. Illustrative examples of Windows-based applications using Rain are provided as source code. A sample web service and a web application were also developed as possible use of the component.