Dear WeatherCat station caregivers,
The following would appear to be a sudden, if brief, downpour:
There is just one small problem with this sequence of events, this all occurred when the skies where mostly clear. So what's going on here?
The first rain gauge bucket tip actually followed one about noon. I've noticed for whatever reason there are occasional "phantom" bucket tips. I think what is happening is that the bucket get very close to tipping with drizzle or whatever and the heat of the sun causes something to expand shifting the balance. However, 5:15pm something was seriously amiss here.
So I went out to the rain gauge and found the collector cone with a significant puddle of water. Some small bits of plant debris had plugged the hole so that what little rain we had gotten Tuesday and Wednesday hadn't been able to tip the buckets.
Well, what should a station caregiver do under such conditions? The accumulated water was the rain from the previous event. It sure would have been good to count what had fallen. So I took a small wire and tried to push through the obstruction.
Surprise! The resulting "rainfall rate" was - shall we say -
noticeable!Fortunately, no data reporting service apparently noticed the anomaly and now I have as accurate a rainfall total as I'm going to get for February. The grand total: 0.14". According to my synthetic channel, we are already over 1/2" behind the normal rainfall for February and counting.
Still there is a lesson for everyone using WeatherCat. It is amazingly easy for your rain gauge to get plugged. It is best to check it frequently and better still to locate your rain gauge where it is easy to work on.
Edouard