Abstract
The weighing precipitation gauge with auto-empting capability was developed in the R&D project organized by the Research Agency for Climate Science (RACS) and supported by the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). This project was initiated in line with the KMA's plan executed since 2010 to introduce the weighing precipitation gauges partly into of their Automatic Weather Station (AWS) network in order to upgrade the quality of precipitation data. The innovative feature of this research is that the auto-empting in weighing precipitation gauge is realized by abrupt rotation of receiving container. The prototype was tested in compliance with the relevant standards of KMA. The results of performance test on rainfall measurement in laboratory verified that the accuracies for 20 mm and 100 mm reference rainfall amount were 0.1 mm and 0.4 mm, respectively in both conditions of auto-empting and no-empting. During the rotation of container for auto-empting, the data was extrapolated smoothly by applying the same precipitation intensity of the previous 10 sec. Consequently, it was found that the auto-empting precipitation gauge developed in this research is quite enough to be used for the operational purpose of accurate measurement with 0.1 mm resolution, regardless of the precipitation intensity.
