Detecting Rainfall Onset Using Sky Images
This work addresses rainfall nowcasting for meteorology and agriculture, but it is incremental as it applies existing imaging methods to a specific detection task.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting rainfall onset using ground-based sky cameras, achieving an accuracy of 89% validated with rain gauge measurements.
Ground-based sky cameras (popularly known as Whole Sky Imagers) are increasingly used now-a-days for continuous monitoring of the atmosphere. These imagers have higher temporal and spatial resolutions compared to conventional satellite images. In this paper, we use ground-based sky cameras to detect the onset of rainfall. These images contain additional information about cloud coverage and movement and are therefore useful for accurate rainfall nowcast. We validate our results using rain gauge measurement recordings and achieve an accuracy of 89% for correct detection of rainfall onset.