Estimation of uncertainty for

calibration Tipping Bucket rain

gauge in Senamhi-Per
David Enrique Velsquez Ros Efran Duwal Parra Quispe

ABSTRACT
The National Meteorological and Hydrological Service SENAMHI from Peru
have installed Tipping Bucket rain gauges as part of the weather automatic
station network around the country; also, we have a laboratory with
equipment for calibration of them. We compared two methods, constant rate
and burette- It was concluded that constant rate method should provide a
calibration coefficient that is more robust at higher intensities than one
measured by the burette method. It was also concluded that gauges
calibrated by the constant rate method will underestimate at higher rainfall
intensities and better precision could be obtained by use of a full dynamic
calibration. The influence of temperature on the calibration methods
themselves was concluded to be small and can be corrected for if required
The calibration coefficient of tipping bucket rain gauges varies with
temperature although in most gauges the change was found to be small. the
results obtained in the laboratory show that the uncertainty associated with
the measurement of rainfall intensity obtained by tipping-bucket rain
gauges can be at less than 2% over a wide range of slow rain rates and 5%
high rain rates.