Homemade Rain Catcher
Making a homemade rain catcher for a school project or as a personal rain gauge is a simple project that you can finish in just a few minutes. The rain catcher will indicate how much rain fell in a particular area in a given time. Use this device to record rainfall at home, or to teach lessons in school.
Materials
To make your own rain catcher, get a plastic container with a flat bottom that has or can be modified to have an opening at the top that is the same size as the bottom. If these measurements aren't consistent, the rainfall readings will not be accurate. Get a ruler, some tape and a permanent marker.
Assembly
Assemble the rain catcher by cutting the plastic jug so that the opening in the top will be the same width as the flat bottom. Ideally, the design should make a cylindrical plastic container that is the same width all the way down. The depth of the container is not as important as this will not alter the rainfall readings.
Tape a ruler to the side of the jug. Make sure that the end of the ruler is at the exact same level with the bottom of the container. Use your marker to carefully mark off the inches of depth on the side of the container and write in the numbers. Go back and mark off the half and quarter-inch marks in between the inches.
Your rain catcher is ready for use. All that needs to happen is for you to place it outside and wait for the rain.
Possible Experiment
To better understand how a rain catcher works, students can take part in a class project that will help them get a grasp on how precipitation amounts vary from place to place. Hook up a sprinkler in the middle of a lawn area and ask the students to place their rain catchers where they believe their catcher will collect the most water from the sprinkler. Make sure their names are on the rain catchers.
After they place the rain catchers around the lawn, turn on the sprinkler for a half hour and then turn it off. Have the students collect their rain catchers and compare readings. Explain to the students how the pattern of the sprinkler is not unlike weather patterns all around the world. The placement of the sprinkler had something to do with the results and so did the way the sprinkler shoots out water. The wind also could have changed the results of each reading.
Now that they have seen the rain catcher in action, the students should take their creations home and leave them outdoors and come back in a month to talk about how much rain they collected and how different readings vary from neighborhood to neighborhood.
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