East Asia and Western Pacific METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATE

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various rainfall intensity should fall within 2% aside of rate-error.
Scattering of experimental data along the regression curve shown in
Figure 2, clearly reflects the marginal range of the understated
errors.
SUMMARY
On account of its low-cost, its minimal maintenance requirement,
and its telemetric recording capability, the tipping-bucket gauge has
been widely used in a meteorological station for the measurement of
rainfall amount and rainfall rate.
However, the inherent rate-error
associated with the bucket tipping motion may be as high as 35% as
observed in the laboratory experiment when measuring a very intense
rainstorm.
Removal of the rate-error is possible and practical.
The rateerror
of 8.1% before rectification is brought back to 0.8% after
rectification as demonstrated in this paper for the measurement of a
rainstorm in a 24-hour period.
Therefore, it is believed that the
rate-error removal technique recommended here ought to stimulate
reconsideration of the conventional tipping-bucket raingauge as a
reliable meteorological instrument.
REFERENCES
1) World Meteorological Organization, "Annotated Bibliography on
Precipitation Measurement Instruments", WMO-No. 343 (1973).
2) Chu, Ping-hai (ed.), "Dictionary of Meteorology", Shanghai
Publishing Co, (1985).
3) Middleton, W.E.'K., "Catalog of Meteorological Instruments in the
Museum of History and Technology", Smithsonian Institution Press
(1969).
4) Middleton, W.E.K. and Spilhaus, A.F.,"Meteorological Instruments",
University of Toronto Press (1953).
5) Donnelly, Denis P., "Digital Raingage Recorder", Journal of Applied
Meteorology 16, 205-207 (1977).
6) Parkin, D. A,, King, W...D* and Shaw, D.E., "An Automatic Recording
Raingage Network for a Cloud-seeding Experiment", Journal of Applied
Meteorology 21, 227-236 (1982).
7) Gedzelman, Stanley David, "The Science and Wonders of the
Atmosphere", John Wiley & Sons (1980).