Natural, Meteorology, And Novel – IAP Data Processing Method for Tipping Bucket Based Rain Gauge

Air pollution transport is entangled with weather and climate factors. As the pollutants tend to move due to the metrological condition. Naturally, pollutants will be deposited to the ground at the end part of the deposition cycle. One of the factors of pollutant deposition in a wet deposition is rain. The soluble pollutants and particulate matter are precipitated to the earth’s surface during precipitation. In order to analyse it, we need a rainfall measuring device/rain gauge, as rainfall is an important parameter to find the correlation between the two. However, there is a limited number of rain-gauge in Indonesia. Thus, we proposed a tipping bucket rain gauge, which consists of a funnel, a bucket, a magnetic switch sensor, and a microcontroller-based processing unit. The prototype is equipped with a GSM module so that the data can be sent in real-time via text message every minute, also an SD Card as the backup storage data. It was calibrated using ISO 17025:2005 standard, the result obtained by a resolution of 0.2 mm/tip with a capacity of 4.2 ml buckets, and U95 uncertainty of ±0,04 - ±0,12 mm/minute. To find the suitable method of rainfall calculation for the prototype, we observe three methods, Natural, Meteorology, and Novel-IAP. From the three we found, Novel-IAP has the best result since the calculation is executed every second. And the other methods are found to have a high error result.