In the study of meteorological elements, rainfall is an important part. Rainfall observation is a dynamic input project to study the hydrological cycle system of a river basin or region. It is one of the important basic data of water resources. The amount of precipitation will affect the production and life of human beings and other fields. If there is too much rainfall, it will lead to natural disasters such as floods, landslides, mudslides, etc., and it will also cause economic losses and inconvenience to human production and life; Contradiction; causing land salinization or land desertification, etc.
Due to the strong local and diurnal variation of rainfall, it has been difficult to carry out quantitative measurement of rainfall day by day in history. However, with the advancement of technology and the rapid development of electronic sensors, our rain gauges for detecting rainfall have also developed from artificial rain gauges and siphon rain gauges to today’s tipping bucket rain gauges and optical rain gauges. We are already very familiar with tipping bucket rain gauges, so let’s learn about optical rain gauges today.
Optical Rain Gauge features
Optical rain gauge is a new type of meteorological sensor, based on the principle of photoelectric detection, mainly used to measure rainfall. When raindrops (or other precipitation particles such as snow particles) pass through the sampling space, the raindrops will block the laser light, and the optical signal received by the receiving sensor and the electrical signal (such as voltage or current) converted from the optical signal will change. After sampling the space, the electrical signal of the receiving sensor restores the state before the raindrops entered the sampling space. When the raindrops pass through the sampling space, the electrical signal of the receiving sensor can be processed to obtain the time when the raindrops pass through the sampling space.
SenTec Optical Rain Gauge adopts the principle of infrared light sensing, and uses the characteristic of different light transmission properties when there are no water droplets in the air to judge the rainfall. It has built-in multiple optical probes, strict optical path analysis, and reliable rainfall detection. It can be widely used in smart irrigation, Ship navigation, mobile weather station, automatic doors and windows, geological disasters and other industries and fields.
Optical Rain Gauge vs mechanical rain gauges
Different from mechanical rain gauges, optical rain gauges are smaller, more sensitive and reliable, smarter and easier to maintain. Optical rain gauges use electron optics and a series of microelectronic filtering, amplification, and detection techniques, which have the advantage of sensitivity over conventional mechanical rain gauges. During installation, because the optical rain gauge is non-mechanical and non-contact measurement, there is no horizontal installation requirement, the installation is simple, and the later maintenance is also convenient.
The optical rain gauge has RS485 type and pulse type two signal outputs to choose from. Among them, the RS485 type can be matched with a small ultrasonic wind speed and direction sensor and a small ultrasonic weather station.
RS485 optical rain gauge can upload the collected data to the computer software through the RS485 to USB module.
You can also connect to a small host or weather host to upload data to our environmental monitoring cloud platform for real-time monitoring.
