New answers tagged meteorology
2
The tilt is not the real reason for the perpetually warm, humid weather in the tropics.
If the Earth tilted 90 degrees, the entire planet wouldn't become super hot and "tropical", seasons would just vary a lot more.
See Uranus, which is tilted about 98 degrees, and so the entire planet has a season of full sunlight and a season of full shade. ...
3
You could connect a funnel to a water wheel.
The faster it spins the higher intensity of the rain.
This sensor was selected randomly, as should not be consider something I specifically endorse.
https://usa.banggood.com/TZT-5V-Piezoelectric-Film-Vibration-Sensor-Switch-Module-TTL-Level-Output-Geekcreit-for-Arduino-products-that-work-with-official-Arduino-...
5
A 'video disdrometer' is a device for characterizing raindrop size distributions. Professional versions (e.g A 1D distrometer) can use a video camera to image the shadow cast by water droplets moving in front of a bright light. So one DIY approach might be a camera imaging rain drops falling through a gap.
Delft university have put up an instructable for an ...
4
I sort of accidentally did this in one of my projects in a complicated, backhanded sort of way.
I installed 16 soil moisture sensors in my yard as part of an attempt to track the distribution of water in the soil of a flower garden.
The sensors are battery powered. They transmit their data via Bluetooth Low Energy to a couple of WiFi enabled control nodes in ...
12
It's not perfect, but a simple solution to the issue of a puddle building up on the resistance plate is to tilt the plate a bit, so that instead of the water building up on the plate it runs off. Your device would then look for sudden drops in resistance, indicating that a droplet has formed on the device, followed by the resistance rising again after the ...
5
I would approach this by counting pings on a plate with an attached piezo or microphone. The amplitude of the ping will give the volume of the drop and the number of pings the drop quantity. This is a more robust real-world interface than an electrode sensor.
16
If you're open to a more mechanical solution, I'd suggest building a "tipping bucket rain gauge", best explained by a picture (source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Sideview-of-tipping-bucket-Rain-Gauge_fig4_304297354):
This should be relatively easy to build and it's trivial to read this electronically by detecting the time it takes to tip. ...
12
Upon reading the question my first thought was, please define what is meant by "how hard is it raining?".
The answers to the question Is there a consensus on the “heaviness” of rain? list rain intensity units as being L/m2 or mm/h, which are effectively the same thing (mm/h can be converted to L/m2) and I'm not disagreeing about either.
My initial ...
12
One way to do that is to estimate how much water is changing. If you can ignore the spill over, then that is approximately how much the puddle is changing.
Another idea you can use is to measure the changing weight of a rain gauge (that will need to be emptied daily, unless you can rig something that will do that for you). The faster the weight increases, ...
5
If there was a worldwide standard, then WMO would have imposed it to its members. Here are the definitions in the American (NOOA/NWS) standard:
http://www.njweatherscan.com/definitions_of_precipitation.htm
Light rain: falling rate of less than 2,54 mm/h.
Moderate rain: falling rate of more than 2,8 mm/h, but less than 7.6 mm/h.
Heavy rain: fallin rate of ...
4
The German Weather Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD) provides the following definitions:
Heavy rain is defined as large amounts of precipitation during a fixed period of time. [...]
The DWD issues warnings of heavy rain using three categories:
heavy rain: 15 to 25 l/m² within 1 hour or 20 to 35 l/m² within 6 hours
severly heavy rain: 25 to 40 l/m² ...
1
Yes, In he tropics where humidity is more ubiquitous moist air currents feed systems that allow for storms. In temperate climates these storms proliferate where it's warm and humid and die off in winter.
3
It really depends on how you define storms. For tropical storms, there are some regions where they are not usually a threat. Likewise, for extratropical storms, there are latitudes where such things are not a concern (such as the tropics). The key to understanding the seasonality to such storms is to understand what controls the seasonality of what drives ...
6
The Virtual tour is good, and I don't know why that wasn't an accepted answer. So I'll throw my answer into the ring. I'll recommend you try the NWP and Forecasting Comet module (it's free if to get an account). That'll probably help more than my answer, which is based around the forecasting classes that I took and my experience as a forecaster in the ...
5
The National Weather Service actually has a nice forecast summary page that answers your question:
Our scientists thoroughly review current observations using technology such as radar, satellite and data from an assortment of ground-based and airborne instruments to get a complete picture of current conditions. Forecasters often rely on computer programs to ...
6
The temperate concepts of winter and summer don't quite apply to the tropics, the region between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer. That region experiences two maxima and two minima per year in terms of top of the atmosphere (TOA) insolation. The solstices mark the times at which TOA insolation is at a minimum at the equator. The equinoxes are ...
19
Tropical climates usually aren't subject to typical extratropical seasons and are instead characterized by rainy/dry seasons. However, if you define the "summer" and "winter" using the typical nothern/southern hemisphere convention, rather than by local vernacular in the region, then the answer is yes. According to the Global Historical ...
2
Clouds are large masses of tiny liquid water droplets suspended in water vapor-saturated atmosphere (100% relative humidity). At a constant altitude and temperature, this system is in equilibrium: there's always some exchange of water molecules from the surface of these droplets into the surrounding saturated atmosphere and vice versa. Water droplets will ...
2
(English is not my first language, so be nice if the words are wrong)
Basically it's kinetic energy of the water molecules (above 0 K, absolute zero); that energy isn't evenly distributed, so a few molecules have higher energy than others.
Some have enough energy to "jump off", becoming an isolated "gas molecule", leaving the others ...
4
Clouds form in areas where the relative humidity exceeds 100%. Add enough dry air to a cloud and the relative humidity drops below 100%, making the cloud dissipate. It's that simple.
Or almost that simple. Entrainment occurs because clouds are large. The dry air isn't instantaneously injected throughout the cloud. It instead erodes the cloud from the edges. ...
7
You may be assuming cloud droplets are in a "rest" state or some finite ordered state. Cloud droplets are actually growing/shrinking continuously as each molecule of water reacts to its environment and either condenses, evaporates, or remains in solution. Atmospheric pressure aloft is also low enough that the "boiling point" of water ...
3
One might say it's a "perfect storm", heat-wave version. High pressure aloft and wind patterns driven by a low-pressure trough on the ground conspire to raise surface temperatures.
According to a summary from the Washington Post:
The intensity of this heat dome, based on projected atmospheric pressure at high altitudes, “is forecast to be near the ...
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