Automating rainfall recording: Ensuring homogeneity when instruments change

Abstract

Sub-daily rainfall is used in modelling of small catchments, design of urban drainage, calculating soil erosion, understanding the water balance of vegetated catchments, and assessing the impact of climate change on short duration storms. Hence it is critical to ensure that sub-daily rainfall records are homogeneous, but with a global shift to automated measurement of rainfall, there has been a change in the rainfall recording instrumentation. Although changes in instrumentation should be documented, in many cases this is not the case and station metadata are missing. As result, studies of rainfall patterns, particularly those investigating trends, often cannot report their treatment of poss..