What is a tipping bucket rain gauge?

Tipping bucket rainfall gauge, also known as tipping bucket rain sensor or Tipping bucket rain gauge, is used in meteorological stations (stations), hydrological stations, agriculture, forestry, national defence and other related departments to measure liquid precipitation, precipitation intensity, precipitation start and end time of the apparatus.

Using 0.2mm, 0.5mm, 1mm resolution, especially suitable for flood control, water supply debugging, power station reservoir water management for the purpose of hydrological automatic reporting system, automatic field reporting station, for precipitation measurement sensor.

Tipping bucket rain gauge is made up of the main parts, such as water-bearing mouth, filter, upper barrel, coupling screw, magnet, dry reed switch, lower barrel, tipping bucket, limit screw, lock nut, base, levelling bubble, levelling screw and so on.

The rainwater collected by the water outlet, through the upper cylinder (funnel) filter, injected into the measuring hopper - hopper is injection moulded with engineering plastics and divided into two equal-volume triangular hopper chamber with the middle partition. It is a mechanical bistable structure, when one hopper receives water, the other hopper is in a waiting state. When the volume of water received reaches a predetermined value (6.28, 15.7, 31.4 ml), the other hopper is in a waiting state due to gravity toppling itself over and the other hopper is in a working state. When its receiving water volume reaches a predetermined value, it again overturns itself and is in a waiting state. In the side wall of the hopper is equipped with a magnet, it is with the hopper when tipped over from the dry reed switch side scanning, so that the two dry reed switch round break. That is, every time the tipping bucket is tipped over, the dry reed switch will send out a switch signal (pulse signal). So that the number of times the tipping bucket turned over with a magnet scanning dry reed switch sends a pulse signal counting, each record a pulse signal, will represent 0.2mm, 0.5mm, 1mm precipitation, to achieve the purpose of precipitation telemetry.

The Tipping bucket rain gauge has a variety of applications, including but not limited to:

Meteorological observation: Meteorologists use tipping bucket rain gauge to measure and record rainfall to understand and predict weather changes.

Hydrological monitoring: Hydrologists use tipping bucket rain gauge to monitor changes in water volume in rivers, lakes and groundwater to understand the distribution and changes in water resources.

Agricultural applications: Agronomists use tipping bucket rain gauges to monitor rainfall on farmland in order to develop rational irrigation and fertiliser plans.

Urban Drainage: Urban planners and engineers use tipping bucket rain gauges to monitor the operation of urban drainage systems and to understand the pressure and challenges of the drainage system during the rainy season.

Environmental monitoring: Environmentalists use the tipping bucket rain gauge to monitor the chemical composition and pollution of rainwater, and to understand the quality and trends of the environment.

Tipping bucket rain gauge is a reliable and practical instrument for measuring rainfall and is widely used in meteorology, hydrology, agriculture, urban planning and environmental protection.

In addition, the tipping bucket rain gauge has various types, such as pulse type/RS485/analogue type. This kind of instrument has a high degree of automation, obtains precipitation in a timely manner, and the data monitored by the tipping bucket rain gauge can be automatically uploaded to the environmental monitoring cloud platform, generating tables and graphs at any time, and it is also possible to query the historical records to understand the yearly/monthly/daily changes in precipitation, which is very suitable for digital recording.

Therefore, the tipping bucket rain gauge is particularly convenient for automated weather stations. It is used in outdoor environment and can be used alone or together with other sensors in the weather station. It has the advantages of strong anti-interference ability, high measurement accuracy, large storage capacity, convenient networking, fully automatic and unattended, and stable operation.

Tipping bucket rain gauge data sheet

NBL-W-ARS-Tipping-bucket-rain-gauge-instruction-manual.pdf

NBL-W-RS-Rain-sensors-instruction-manual-V4.0.pdf