rain rate-LaCrosse

[ilan72]

i know that i am repeating a subject that was mentioned before , but i couldn't find exactly the answer i needed.

my station (ws-2350) calculates rain only about each 5 minutes( only if it's 0.5 mm or more). why is rain rate= rain in one hour? i understood that comulus knows how to calculate rain rate which will show the intensity of rain in a short period of time( of course, more than 5 minutes in my case).

this is quite important as the rain caracter in my country (Israel) is heavy in many occasions ( 600 mm in 6 months, normally between october to april).

so, maybe i am missing something and i want to be preapered to the next rain season....

and again, sorry if i am repeating a subject which was raised before!

[steve]

Getting a sensible rain rate is not easy with a tipping-bucket rain gauge. Fine Offset and La Crosse weather stations don't provide a rain rate themselves, so Cumulus has to try to calculate an approximation. Initially, I just used the rain the last hour; it's a reasonable approximation. My attempts at an algorithm similar to the one the Davis station uses caused problems in some situations, and I spent a lot of time trying to fix it, but I had to give up. I then changed the Fine Offset calculation to use the rain in the last 5 minutes (so 1 tip in 5 minutes = 3.6 mm/hr, and so on). I thought I had done the same for La Crosse stations, but it seems I left that one at one hour.

I'm going to revisit the rain rate calculation in Cumulus 2 and see if I can improve it and make it more like my Davis station. But even that doesn't produce completely useful figures. As I said, getting a sensible rain rate is not easy to with tipping-bucket rain gauge.

[ilan72]

thank you,Steve, for your reply.

i can't ask for more and any improvement will just make it more perfect than the perfect it is already now.