Development of low-cost and light-weight hydrometeor imaging probe

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Toward ballooning precipitation observation, we developed a new low-cost hydrometeor imaging probe, whose cost is nearly 10,000 Japanese yen. The probe is a sort of high-speed line-scanner, and it captures hydrometeor monochrome image with 128 horizontal pixels of 125 μm resolution and the slice-rate of 33 kHz currently. On the ground-base observation, the probe performs good as a disdrometer measuring raindrop-size distributions (DSD). For the DSD validation, we employed a commercially available disdrometer of Distromet RD80, then the validation demonstrates that the probe captures similar DSD shapes as in RD80. The results ensure a capture rate for raindrops to express reasonable DSD shape. In winter seasons, the probe well performed in low-temperature environment of -25 0 deg C and it successfully captured solid-state hydrometeors image such as snowflakes and graupels. In addition, the probe stably performed in a long period observation for several months, even if the probe is designed as disposal operation.