Wireless Rain Gauge for Disaster-Ready Rainfall Sensing

The Challenge

Flooding and extreme rainfall events pose growing risks to communities and critical infrastructure, yet traditional rain gauges often provide limited spatial coverage and delayed reporting. Many commercial gauges report rainfall at five to ten-minute intervals, can be costly to deploy at scale, and may fail during severe weather or power disruptions. These limitations reduce the ability of emergency services and planners to detect rainfall onset quickly and understand localised variations in rainfall intensity, particularly in complex urban environments or areas with sparse monitoring infrastructure. There is a need for a more scalable, resilient and timely approach to rainfall sensing that can operate reliably across diverse environments and support earlier warnings and improved situational awareness during severe weather events. 

The Solution

This project developed a fully standalone wireless rain gauge that estimates rainfall intensity by analysing variations in everyday mobile communication signals. A compact, self-contained hardware unit was designed and assembled, integrating a central controller, mobile-signal receiver, communications interface and power system for long-term field deployment with little to no installation. Custom firmware enables real-time signal capture, on-board feature extraction and monitoring of signals from more than ten mobile cells, delivering minute-level rainfall updates.

Field deployments across dense urban (UTS), medium-density (Zetland) and open suburban (Homebush) environments demonstrated reliable operation over more than 30 days of continuous data collection. Early results show rainfall detection within approximately two minutes, with around 70–85% of estimates within 1–2 mm/h of benchmark observations. Future work includes expanded deployments, model refinement and trials in flood-prone communities and emergency-response settings. 

Industry Partner

University Partner