My weatherflow has performed flawlessly since installation in early September. This morning I woke up to an unexpected and non-forecast light rain. Ordinarily, the rain sensor is quick to alert to rain. (Curiously, the rain does not show up on RADAR but it is raining enough for rain jackets). My rain sensor has yet to register any rainfall. In the past, it didn’t take much to trigger at least an alert. The graph shows nada. All other sensors are functioning and reporting data.
Is this because it is just a light rain and maybe not “heavy” enough to register? Everything seems to be OK status wise. I don’t see any errors indicating a bad sensor. I did get a weird rain trigger yesterday with not a cloud in the sky, but I had been up on the roof and may have caused this somehow.
Is there another way to check to see if there is an error or a bad sensor?
I think we are all still trying to figure out the rain calibration. I don’t have sufficient experience yet myself, but the Sky seemed to struggle a bit in moderate to very light rain. Drizzle, which I get frequently, didn’t seem to register at all and Rain Check added it the next day.
WF said that the units have CL, continued learning, something like that, to help them continue to calibrate. I am the one trying to do the CL, as I get a feel for the unit.
I had the same thing over the weekend - my Davis registered 6.2mm with rain all afternoon, WF registered 0mm, not even a rain alert. My WF has never been good at rain - often 10x less than my side by side Davis Vue, I have been logging the data with WF but with no effect so far. Oddly it did used to be close but the last few months its drifted notably.
Its at the point where i have had to decommission the WF for online data and go back to Davis, which is really disappointing but the rain fall is so poor its not usable, I have emailed support so waiting to hear back…
Mine has been perfect out of the box. But for the first time it didn’t register a drop. We had a 2.15" rain event over the weekend. Heavy. And it registered within the meniscus of my manual rain gage, so I was very happy with its accuracy (comparatively speaking). But today I am perplexed. Accuracy has never been a problem here. Until today… Maybe I’m dealing with a long lasting heavy drizzle?
We’ve been having high winds here for several days, and for the first couple of days I was getting false rain readings. There were some pretty violent gusts again today, but I just looked and there were no false rain readings. I’m baffled. Sky is VERY securely fixed from the top of a block fence via iron pipe & flange, zero movement.
I think I figured out what happened. My weather station was in a cloud. I went back and looked at the temperature relative to dew point when it was “raining” here and I was getting no indication of rain. The temperature and dew point were identical. And we all know what that means…
My theory is I was in the middle of a cloud basically. Lots of condensing droplets/mist that was sufficient to create rain at ground level. Heck, because of the height of my station, may not have been as much going on up there, I don’t know. This would also explain why the radar was showing no precipitation either. Maybe a very local low level event?
It’s raining here this morning and the sensor is performing perfectly…
Hi Chris,
We’ve had issues with the rain recording too. We are in horticulture and the weather is vital to us. We rely mainly on our Davis Vantage Pro2 with lots of accessories. The WF was installed so staff could follow basic conditions on the internet. We’ve had constant variations between the 2 weather stations in the rain stats but, not wildly different. Rainfall is always less from the WF than the Davis and standalone very accurate manual rain gauge.
Cheers, David (Down Under)
Your battery is very low and the rain sensor has been de activated to preserve energy. Does your Tempest see enough sun ? I hope you didn’t put it in permanent shade or with very short sun periods. It does need to see the sun a few hours on a regular basis to be able to charge.
For what its worth, my replacement Sky has been flakey as hell at detecting rain (the little we have had the past week).
I read a tip on here to tap it and see if it registered, so I did. Sure enough I got a Notification on the phone, but nothing registered in the graphs. About 2 hours later it registered rain on the graphs, but I didn’t get a notification (and it was not raining as I was outside at the time). Since then we have had rain showers on and off for a good day or so, and it detects some, but not others. It rained over night, and nothing is registered on the graphs. It rained at 5pm tonight (again I was outside within a meter of the Sky and got fairly wet), but nothing was registered.
My old Sky picked up just about everything except light drizzle, even the odd, sparse, sprinkle of rain would register.
I seem to recall there was rain CL process back in the day, could the fact we have had so little rain since I replaced it be a factor in its sensitivity being so off (i.e. the CL not had enough data to process?)
Pretty simple, in the webpage for your station or app on your mobile, click on the little Tempest logo top right, page will flip over and you will see all the detailed cards of your station
Welcome. Just do a search in this forum and you will find many posts about missed rain events, Tempest over/under reporting, vibrations caused by wind, etc. Just to say the haptic rain sensor is, well, not so great…
In your case, it was probably (very) light rain which is known to not trigger the sensor.
