Development of the still stand rain gauge for recording rainfall stratigraphy

Storage gauges preserve nothing of the magnitude, number, and arrival time of individual rainfall events which sum to make up the total water depth in the gauge. To overcome the restrictive nature of storage gauges when studying the spatial variation of individual rainfall events, a 'still stand recording rain gauge' has been developed which records the depth of each rainfall event. The term 'still stand recording rain gauge' is from the concept where a collimated radioactive source, cobalt 57, mounted on top of a float in a modified storage gauge which has its intensity calibrated so that each rainless period generates a line on a protected X-ray film. Rainfall magnitudes are thus the vertical intervals between consecutive horizontal lines on the film In effect, the gauge creates a stratigraphic column of rainfall at a given location, and each rainfall 'layer' can be correlated to equivalent layers in nearby still stand gauges for spatial rainfall analysis. The application of the still stand gauge is illustrated with both a transect of twelve gauges across a mountain range and a grid of mine gauges on low relief land