Eli5: how do rain gauges work and how accurate are they?
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The simplest versions are just a straight tube with a ruler printed on the side. 1″ of rain will fill the tube up 1″ and you just read that off the ruler.
You can mess with geometry (big opening, small tube) to make it more sensitive as long as you adjust the ruler to match properly.
They can be pretty accurate; a good digital gauge is good to 0.01″. A manual tube is only as good as the ruler & eyeball using it…down to 1/16″ of an inch is perfectly realistic.
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