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<br />Most of the rain gaugl:S within 230 Ian ofFTG are located in the mountains in the <br /> <br />western sector of the radar scanning domain (Fig. 4), The two conglomerations of gaug,es just to <br /> <br />the west and northwest of the radar are UDFCD gauges in the Denver metropolitan area, and the <br /> <br />remainder are the federally-owned gauges, The Buffalo Creek basin is outlined to the southwest <br /> <br />of the radar, and the "+" symbol is the location of the town of Buffalo Creek where the :f1ood <br /> <br />damage and deaths occurred. There were no automated rain gauges in the basin, however there <br /> <br />was one stonn-total gauge report from a resident of Buffalo Creek of 2.68 inches ofrain. The <br /> <br />flood-producing stonn did not pass over any rain gauge other than this privately-owned gauge in <br /> <br />Buffalo Creek. The closest automated gauge, SPTC2, was located just 9 Ian to the northeast of <br /> <br />Buffalo Creek, however it was missed by the flood-producing stonn and only received 0.07 in. <br /> <br />Of the 145 gauges used in this study, 6] % received rain during the period ]600 UTC on the ]2th <br />to 0800 UTC on the ] 3th. <br /> <br />The gauge data used in this study serves both as independent verification of the PPS radar <br /> <br />estimates as well as direct input into the PPS Adjustment algorithm to compute hourly gauge- <br /> <br />radar biases to automatically correct the operational radar estimates. Fu]ton et al. (1998) <br /> <br />describes the PPS Adjustment algorithm. <br />Since the current PPS gauge-radar Adjustment algorithm will allow at most 50 rain <br /> <br />gauges in its internal databas,e for rainfall calibration purposes due to software limitations, the <br /> <br />145 available gauges were reduced to just 50 for use in algorithm perfonnance testing. This limit <br /> <br /> <br />will be increased to 200 or more in a future PPS version (Miller et al, ] 998), In order to reduce <br /> <br /> <br />the number of gauges to 50 fin testing, they were first ranked in descending order of stonn-total <br /> <br /> <br />rainfall over the period examined. Gauges that were spatially very close to other gauges were <br /> <br />6 <br />