An Umbrella as a Mobile Acoustic Rain Gauge for use in Urban Areas
G.H. Gerritsen (TU Delft - Civil Engineering & Geosciences)
R. Hut – Mentor (TU Delft - Water Resources)
Doris Van Halem – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Sanitary Engineering)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
To validate rainfall intensity in urban areas measured by satellite a first prototype proof of concept is introduced and tested. Using low-cost electronics an umbrella is converted into a mobile acoustic rain gauge which can be used in urban areas to measure rainfall intensities. A reed switch is placed in the umbrella to measure whether the umbrella is open or closed. Using a piezoelectric sensor and a Sparkfun sound detector rain droplets are detected and using a Pycom WiPy send over Bluetooth to an application which saves it on an online server. Tests during a laboratory experiment to see how the output data evolves shows that the data collected have an output range of about 10 % compared to its mean value. During field evaluation, to compare its output data with rainfall intensities as measured with radar, it is shown that the output data follows the radar measurements within acceptable bounds.