[Weather] Acoustic rain gauge

[Matthew Smith]

Quoth Matt at 2007-04-26 19:18...
> Would it be possible to make a rain gauge which listened to the rain ?
> Perhaps put a mic in a drum or similar ?

Measurement of rainfall by this means is not - as far as I can see - 
feasible.  Rainfall is about volume (per area); an acoustic transducer 
could only really measure the product of the velocity of an incoming 
drop multiplied by its mass (will the real physics guys help me out 
here?)  These "hits" would not contain the data to measure the volume/area.

However, we could use a technique like this to measure intensity but:

Measuring "hits" from an acoustic transducer would have problems - 
insects, wind-borne debris and even local turbulence could count as 
raindrops when none were present.

If the signal from an acoustic transducer were, however, sampled 
(probably going out of scope for a 1-Wire ADC, although I'd be more than 
happy to be corrected), then fed the data fed into a computer, it might 
be possible to have software that could be trained to say "this is a bug 
hitting my system", "this is light rainfall", "this is a deluge".

It's not something I'd want to rely on unless someone could give me 
proof to the contrary, but it's an idea.

Cheers

M

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Matthew Smith
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