When it comes to climate change, the very first thing comes to most of our mind is the rising temperature, even though climate change is having a significant impact on the water cycle. Spatial variability of precipitation is becoming more and more extreme year after year. Our research focused on the spatial distribution of precipitation on horizontal scale up to 1-2 km. We established a low cost rain gauge network in Csabacsűd located on the Great Hungarian Plain (N46.49°, E20.39°, 85 m above sea level) with 18 plastic rain gauges which is widely used in the Hungarian private sphere. We examined the qualitative and quantitative correlations of the data with the help of the ESRI ArcGIS software. Spatial variance, deviation, an CV values of precipitation were calculated using Microsoft Office Excel. The results show significant areal differences in daily amount of precipitation within the small (1.5 km x 0.8 km) study area. The largest absolute difference in the small settlement reached 17 mm on 12th July 2018. The smallest value was 25 mm, the largest value was 42 mm and the distance between these stations is 1.4 km Precipitation shows a large spatial inhomogeneity especially in daily or shorter timescales. Especially in case of rain showers the operational meteorological/hydrometeorological networks are not dense enough to give the precipitation information that suits to needs of the agricultural sector. So, on-site measurements are needed in the growing season for practical agrometeorological purposes such as irrigation scheduling.

precipitation, spatial distribution, rain gauge network

agronomy

Presentation: poster