Abstract
Abstract. The Hydrology, Meteorology and Complexity Laboratory of École des Ponts ParisTech (http://hmco.enpc.fr, last access: 24 March 2020) and the Sense-City consortium (http://sense-city.ifsttar.fr/, last access: 24 March 2020) made available a dataset of optical disdrometer measurements stemming from a campaign that took place in September 2017 under the rainfall simulator of the Sense-City climatic chamber, which is located near Paris. Two OTT Parsivel2 disdrometers were used. The size and velocity of drops falling through the sampling area of the devices of roughly a few tens of square centimetres are computed by disdrometers. This enables the estimation of the drop size distribution and the further study of rainfall microphysics or kinetic energy for example. Raw data – basically a matrix containing a number of drops according to classes of size and velocity, along with more aggregated ones such as rain rate and drop size distribution with filtering – are available. The dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3347051(Gires et al., 2019).
Highlights
Numerous rainfall simulators have been developed and used primarily to study soil erosion as well as tillage techniques
For example Meshesha et al (2016) used such a set-up to investigate the relation between kinetic energy (KE) and rain rate (R), while Salles and Poesen (2000) showed that D4V was a better indicator for characterizing splash detachment than KE, which is basically proportional to D3V 2
The three quantities analysed in the paper and made available in the corresponding database are the rain rate R in millimetres per hour, the drop size distribution N(D) per cubic metre per millimetre (N(D)dD is the number of drops per unit volume in cubic metres with an equivolumic diameter between D and D + dD in mm), and the kinetic energy density flux KE in joules per square metre per hour
Summary
Numerous rainfall simulators have been developed and used primarily to study soil erosion as well as tillage techniques. Rainfall simulators exhibit a wide range of complexity in terms of functioning enabling to reproduce more or less the properties of rainfall features depending on the aim of the study and the means available. Some authors analysed the rain simulated with the help of disdrometers, which are devices that give access to size and velocity of the falling drops. In this paper we present disdrometer data collected during a measurement campaign aiming at testing a rainfall simulator installed in the climatic chamber of the Sense-City experiment. Only the required basic elements on their functioning will be mentioned here, while the reader is referred to the previous paper for more details as well as a longer discussion on the potential uses of such data.
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