My hope is that with experience in referring to the Radar products and how they relate to the real world in your orchard, you will find that they are a useful addition to your Management toolbox. The weather data are tailored for specific orchard locations by interpolating between values received from surrounding National Weather Service reporting sites. There are 50 such sites for the apple-growing region in New England. Other agricultural weather networks around the country require large budgets and staff, and leave the interpolation between weather station locations up to the user. If your farm is not one of the specific Radar sites, be cautious in extrapolating from those sites to yours.
Some rain fronts are large and deliver consistent amounts of water across large areas.
Others, such as summer thunderstorms, can be a very localized event, causing a nearby site to have estimates that do not accurately reflect conditions at your location. In addition to interpreting weather observations, the Orchard Radar also uses forecast data in the same way. Weather forecasting is less than perfect, but it is much better than using simple climatic averages. Precipitation forecasting is significantly better than climatology out to roughly 3 or 4 days. Temperature forecasting is significantly better than climatology out to roughly 6-7 days.