Calculate the annual amount of precipitation in the home garden
For your place of residence, you can usually research the annual amount of precipitation on the Internet, but if you have completely if you want to know exactly how much water falls into your own garden each year, you have to determine the precipitation yourself measure up.
The annual amount of precipitation indicates how much precipitation fell on one square meter at a certain location. For this purpose, rain as well as snow, hail and sleet are measured and given in millimeters per square meter.
How to measure the rainfall in your garden
To determine the annual amount of precipitation in your home garden, you first need a rain gauge that you set up in your garden and that catches the rain. Depending on how much money you want to spend on this, you can choose one of the following products.
- A relatively simple measuring device is the analog rain gauge. This is a transparent vessel with a scale from which you can read off the amount of rain that has fallen. If you want, you can also make such a rain gauge yourself.
- The precipitation gauge, which the meteorologist Gustav Hellmann developed and which is named after him, is a little more elaborate. With these devices, the water is collected in a cylinder and then flows through a funnel into a collecting vessel, which has the advantage that the water does not evaporate as easily. These devices include a separate measuring cylinder with a scale into which the water is poured to determine the amount.
- With digital measuring devices, the rainwater first falls into a bowl. This bowl has a tilting mechanism that empties the bowl as soon as it has reached a certain weight. The amount of precipitation is then determined by counting the tilting movements. These devices are even available with a built-in heater so that you can easily measure frozen precipitation such as snow and hail with it.
You can build a precipitation measuring device yourself with simple means. That is …
How to calculate the annual amount of precipitation
- You should set up your rain gauge as free as possible in the garden and write down your measurement results every day. This is relatively easy when it rains, but when there is snow and hail you have to wait until it has melted, so it is helpful to buy two collecting vessels for the winter.
- If you have checked your rain gauge diligently all year round and noted the data, all you have to do at the end of the year is add them up to determine the annual rainfall. Since your rain gauge is probably not one square meter in size, you then have to convert this value to an area of one square meter. One square meter corresponds to 10,000 square centimeters. So you divide 10,000 by the area of your rain gauge in square centimeters and then you have the factor with which You need to multiply the measured rainfall to get the annual rainfall per square meter determine.
- In meteorology, the annual precipitation, also called the annual mean, which is given for a place however, it is not based on a specific year, but is an average value calculated from measurements taken over several years will. In most cases, this is based on precipitation over the past 30 years.
