Rain Gauge Hardware & Software

[@Redounder]

When you measure the surface of the bucket that precise, I think you should also account for the corner radii.

[@ZookeeperJohnG]

Agreed.

[@brianh21858]

The faster you pour in the water from your container, the more inaccurate will be the tip counter, because you'll get splashing inside the housing. That is why your tip count was so different on the second pour. There is another video on KZbin that shows this problem very clearly. For the most accurate measurement, you need to pour the water in at the rate of the rain.

[@ZookeeperJohnG]

Agreed, that is a big factor.

[@miguelolvera3546]

Could you please share that video with me?

[@76queen]

The area of the bowl is 35647mm2 The area of the tipping collector is 5824mm2 Your maths is not correct. If you want the same rainfall to be indicated in both containers you should see 19mm in depth in both. The tipping collector is 1/6.12 the size of the bowl, therefore it should only have 1/6.12 of the water volume in it for the same rain event. Another way to explain it is that if you had a bowl with a diameter that’s 1/6.12 of the original bowl the rain collected in the smaller bowl should be 19mm in depth. =

[@ZookeeperJohnG]

My math is spot on based on NWS reported rainfall in our area. Accounting for differences during more isolated rainfall events as compared to larger area steady rains, my testing and the math resulted in a near zero error to commercial devices costing many hundreds of dollars.

[@wa4aos]

CC = ML You made this way too hard. Get a 100 cc syringe, slowly pour water into a bucket until it tilts. The stand must be level. Subtract volume used for 1 tilt from total volume in syringe, then you have the volume/tilt. These units are already designed to tilt for a specific volume of water. Many are set for 1 tilt/.01 inches and some sre ste to .011, the extra to account for a small amount which does not fall from the tilt, of course, use a cc/mm to inches conversion as needed. You should be able to find specs on your tilt unit. Based on what I think you were seeing, my guess is 1 tilt = half an inch but use my method to measure the tilt volume. Good luck !!

[@ZookeeperJohnG]

I disagree. The goal was to learn from experimentation what the correlation between tips and rainfall amount was, not to simply assume what is posted on the 'net is correct.