Study of the errors of rainfall recorded at the Balearic A.W.S. Throught comparison with traditional rain gauges

Abstract

The automatic weather stations ruled by the Spanish Instituto Nacional de Meteorología at the Balearic Islands are located at conventional pluviometric stations, provided with a Hellmann gauge whose measures have been used to assess the reliability of the AWS tipping bucket records over the observational period of each station. The study has been carried out with the eight Balearic AWS with more than 200 days with at least 1 mm rainfall. Taking the conventional measures as the reference, the average correction factors to the different AWS range from 0.96 to 1.22. The influence of the rainfall intensity on these errors has also been considered. It is statistically significant in most of AWS, though its contribution to the errors is generally little and varied in nature.