Measuring precipitation with raingauges

Ian Strangeways

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511535772.012

8 - Measuring precipitation with raingauges

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2009

Ian Strangeways

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Summary

By the mid nineteenth century all basic raingauge design principles had been established, in no small part thanks to George Symons. We will now take a look at the design of modern raingauges and then at what errors need to be taken note of. Because the measurement of snowfall is even more difficult than the measurement of rainfall, for reasons that will be made clear later, a separate chapter (Chapter 9) is devoted to it.

Definitions

By ‘raingauge’ I mean a device that collects the rain in a funnel and then measures the water in some way. A few raingauges do not actually catch the rain but measure it indirectly, and these are included at the end of the chapter.

The term ‘precipitation’ includes rain, drizzle, snow and hail, but not condensation in the form of dew, fog, hoar frost or rime, even though they can produce trace readings in a gauge of up to 0.2 mm. The total precipitation is the sum of all the liquid collected (including the water produced from melted solid precipitation), expressed as the depth it would cover on a flat surface assuming no losses due to evaporation, runoff or percolation into the ground. While inches have been used in the past to measure precipitation, and still are in some countries, millimetres are the more usual unit today (0.01 inches is about equivalent to 0.25 millimetres).

Type: Chapter
Information: Precipitation
Theory, Measurement and Distribution
, pp. 151 - 181

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511535772.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2006

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