Identifying Individual Rain Events with a Dense Disdrometer Network

Figure 6

An illustration showing how extremely similar data records can sometimes be partitioned into events differently. Here, an intense rain event trails off to a drizzle. However, this slight drizzle is just enough to finish a single tip (over a one-hour period) in detectors B, C, and F. Other detectors less than 5 meters away did not accumulate exactly the same amount of rainfall and thus did not have this tip occurring during the mostly quiescent period. Consequently, 3 of the 10 detectors see one long (but highly variable) event while the other 7 detectors see 2 separate events—even though realistic values for MIT (1 hour) and (15 minutes with detection) are used.

(a)

(b)