Technology Evolved and So is Rain Gauge

When rain starts to drop, we are still required to have existing equipment on the group to capture the amount of raindrops during that hour or certain period.

This is where the rain gauge comes in – to serve as a standard measurement and to determine the amount of raindrops in the city and estimate the possibility of damage that can be caused by this amount of raindrops during heavy rain season.

Conventional Rain Gauge

Let us talk about the rain gauge. The first rain gauge is invented by a Korean, called King Sejong, from Korean Choson Dynasty, around year 1441. The main intention is to measure the rain amount to determine the tax that can be charged on his citizen in crops collection. Rain amount indirectly determines the growth of the crops from the paddy field, which explains how much the farmers can earn during the rainy season.

How does the first generation rain gauge look like? The item is a combination of a funnel with a cylinder container. The equipment is placed around an area without shade, to ensure the rain drops into the funnel to collect the droplets in the cylinder container. By using the height of the water level in the container, they can determine the amount of rain in that area or city.

There is a study on how to estimate the overall amount droplets in that city using this rain gauge, you can search on internet to understand more on this section.

As it turns out, first generation always have their limitation. It is not the best during that time, but it’s the only thing that helps to collect and measure the rain measurement. The current equipment is still required workforce to monitor and manage the rain gauge. Due to the fixed amount of raindrops that can be collected by the cylinder container, the assigned need to ensure the height of water need to be recorded accordingly and remove the water after. The whole equipment is required to be disassembled to remove the rain water. With some parallax errors on human eyesight, the value might be a little off.

You might wonder, why not make it bigger and taller? Well, if the wind is strong enough, it may be able to blow the whole equipment away. It is hard to clean the container as well when algae or fungus starts to grow in the container.

Second Generation Rain Gauge

After 200 years of using the first generation rain gauge, two legends from Europe, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke created the second generation rain gauge inspired by tipping bucket. They called it the tipping rain gauge.

Instead of measuring the height of the water level, the tipping rain gauge works differently. It is similar with the standard rain gauge in using a funnel to transfer rainwater; the only difference is the capturing method. Once the equipment comes with two pockets which will flip once the space is occupied with water. Once the pocket is full on the first pocket, it still flips or taps to the other side, and second pocket area is ready to collect the rainwater. If you hook a pen with the equipment, you can calculate the number of times the pocket flip and calculate the estimate amount of rain droplet during the rain. Good thing about this equipment is that you do not require bothering or worrying about the overflow of the rainwater during the rain drops collection.

As it turns out, there are still few challenges when using this equipment during the old time era, whereby it still requires worker to take note of the number of tapping. It is hard to capture or obtain the correct data during the older days, compared to the technology that we have in modern time

Improvised, improved to make it better

To unlock the full potential of the tipping rain gauge, this is where the Japanese truly put their effort to improve the rain gauge and use it ever since. Instead of buying the equipment online, they just build up their own tipping rain gauge using some common houseware materials, like aluminum plate and plastic pipe, combined with some modern sensor which allowed them to deploy the modified rain gauge around different city and state to measure the overall rain droplets, to alert the citizen the possibility of flood in certain areas during the raining season.

The holes at the bottom allow the rainwater to drain out, so excessive rainwater will not overflow the equipment.

Each tap or drop of rainwater from the pocket is equivalent to 0.5mm (about 0.02 in) height of rainwater.

To avoid electric shock caused by water vapor or rain droplets, they are using magnetic sensor to capture the number of tapping when collecting rain droplets.

Magnetic sensor is attached to both sides, to ensure the magnetic field able to trigger the magnetic sensor at the custom build circuit.

Once the equipment is covered, funnel is placed at the top and counter machine is reset.

When they start to pour the water into the water gauge, the counter machine will start to record the number of tapping throughout the experiment process.

They always have a standard chart around to remind the citizen the danger or rainwater height during the raining season. If the rainwater level keeps increasing, they might have to evacuate the citizen to higher ground.

Weather news report has been a serious matter for Japan, because Japan always has some mini earthquake, unpredictable rain which can cause a lot of issue to the citizens. Based on their previous report or history, in year 1920, May 25, they used to have rain so heavy that within 8 minutes the water level increased until 126mm (about 4.96 in). If you refer to the diagram above, it is profoundly serious and caused serious damages to their houses. Live weather reporting for 24 hours has been their practice for many years, to ensure majority of the citizen aware of the current weather in their resident area.

Time to Wrap Up

If you are interested on weather study, you could always refer to the link below. How the Japanese demo or explain on how they measure the rainwater daily using their modified equipment, https://youtu.be/0dnoMP_iISs . It remarkably interesting how the mechanism works. We can learn from them, build one and place it on certain areas which always have the flood issue in Malaysia.

If you interested on the history of the rain gauge, can refer to this link, https://www.softschools.com/inventions/history/rain_gauge_history/265/ .

If you have a better idea on how to improve rain gauge with IOT solutions, we are welcome you to drop us an email and share your thoughts with us.

Until next time, if we find more interesting discoveries, we will share it to you here. Stay tune for more interesting blog feeds from us.