Thunder storm Tauranga, New Zealand

[Brendan]

Hi there, here are some photos of the action today in Tauranga, New Zealand. For more photos of today weather go to http://www.frameit2010.com and go to the photo page.

Brendan.

[Ned]

Some serious hail there, we ony had a smattering here. I see the weather station on your link lost signal from the outside unit around 11am - was that storm related?

[Brendan]

Yes we have EOL wireless internet here, and the repeater must have gone down, there was no power cut here, but sometimes thing happen between us and the repeaters.... But all going now.

Brendan

[DaveNZ]

Interesting Tauranga got it, missed out here in east Auckland on any thunder or hail. Did get some torrential showers though - max rain rate reached 99.4mm/hr

[Super-T]

Hi Dave
That's a high rain rate. I only showed 25mm.
(we are only about 300 metres separation)
Maybe I lose a lot with splatter.

[steve]

Hi Dave
That's a high rain rate. I only showed 25mm.
(we are only about 300 metres separation)
Maybe I lose a lot with splatter.

Don't forget that Dave has the benefit of the 'clever' VP2 calculated rain rate based on the time between two adjacent bucket tips, whereas you have the 'dumb' Cumulus calculated rain rate based on the amount of rain in the past 5 minutes. So Dave has the potential for much higher calculated rates from a brief period of heavy rain.

[Super-T]

Must have been a real short burst then

[DaveNZ]

Yes Terry, the Davis VP2 can display rates averaged over about 12 seconds I think? It was the shower at 3.30pm yesterday where I reached 99mm/hr. You can't have not noticed it if you were home, LOL it was so loud (and yes it was brief)

[Super-T]

Must have been just on you because I show no tips at 3:30pm. Maybe the neighbour dumped a bucket on your rain gauge

[Brendan]

Hi there, I have had a high rain rate to, Highest Rain Rate 100.8 mm/hr at 4:07 PM on 16 July 2010. My station takes reading every 48sec, well thats what the book says.

High rates can happen, when I got that rain full rate, it was in a cloud burst, same time as I got rain fade on the satelite for the TV.

Just saying, and there was no bucket of water on mine......
Brendan
http://www.frameit2010.com

[Gina]

I don't know about elsewhere but here in the UK we often get very isolated showers (generally with thunderstorms). When I lived in a town, there were times when it was raining one side of the street and not the other. And, of course, geographical feature such as rivers and hills can divide the weather.

[Brendan]

it can be the same here, it has rained on one side of the street and on the other side dry..... ant the weather odd at times.....

Brendan
http://www.frameit2010.com

[DaveNZ]

Must have been just on you because I show no tips at 3:30pm. Maybe the neighbour dumped a bucket on your rain gauge

Hi Terry, can you go to Select-a-graph and plot daily rain total from midday 29th to midnight, so I can compare, I have attached mine
I'm interested to see how different they are...

20100829rain.PNG

[mcrossley]

Don't forget that Dave has the benefit of the 'clever' VP2 calculated rain rate based on the time between two adjacent bucket tips, whereas you have the 'dumb' Cumulus calculated rain rate based on the amount of rain in the past 5 minutes. So Dave has the potential for much higher calculated rates from a brief period of heavy rain.

Any plans on changing the Cumulus calculation for C2 (maybe you already have and I missed it!)? I downloaded a paper the other day on calculating rainfall rate on tip timing - and the effects of the sample rate on the outcome. My thoughts were that even with a FO 48 second sample rate it would work much better than a 5 minute average.

[steve]

Any plans on changing the Cumulus calculation for C2

Yes, I'm going to have another go at some point. I do actually have a working algorithm based on the one the VP2 uses (it's not particularly complicated), but when I turned it on in Cumulus (v1) there were a few situations to do with the timing of logger data at start up which caused it to go haywire, so I turned it off again, as I didn't really have the time to sort it out.