» 3.0 Rain Gauges

Two tipping bucket rain gauges operated from 3 November 2005 through 10 February 2006. The rain gauges counted the number of tips that occurred in each 10 second interval with each tip corresponding to 1/100 of an inch of rain. The 10-second recorded time stamp corresponds to the end of the accumulation period. The rain gauge clock is the same as the S-band profiler clock. There was also a pressure sensor installed with the rain gauges.

3.1 Daily Images

Daily images in PNG format were generated to show the 10 second surface pressure, 1-minute rain rate, and the rain accumulation throughout the day. The filename follows the format dar_raingauge_yyyy_ddd.png, where yyyy is the year and ddd is the day of year. An example is show below:

The image files can be found on the ftp site: ftp://ftp1.esrl.noaa.gov/users/cwilliams/Darwin/rain_gauge/images/ .

3.2 ASCII Data Format

The tipping bucket rain gauge data are stored in daily files following the naming convention: dar_raingauge_yyyy_ddd.dat, where yyyy is the year and ddd is the day of year. Each daily file contains 8640 rows (24*60*6) and bad or missing data values are indicated with a value of -99.9.There are 12 columns in each data file with each column having the following variable:

Column     Description

1                    Year

2                    Day of year

3                    Month

4                    Day of month

5                    Hour

6                    Minute

7                    Second (end of accumulation period)

8                    Precipitation unit #1   (1/100 of an inch)

9                    Precipitation unit #2   (1/100 of an inch)

10                Pressure  (hPA)

11                Battery Voltage (Volts)

12                Temperature inside shed (degrees C)

The ASCII data files can be found on the ftp site: ftp://ftp1.esrl.noaa.gov/users/cwilliams/Darwin/rain_gauge/dat/