The Pacific Rainfall Program, in collaboration with the Pacific Islands Global Climate Observing System (PI-GCOS), is working to install a comprehensive network of tipping bucket rain gauges (TBG) throughout the tropical Pacific region. The gauges are maintained by the local meteorological services, while PACRAIN provides technical support and receives copies of the data. To date, almost 50,000 observations (i.e. tips) representing close to 2,000 gauge-days of data from 7 sites have been collected. Previous efforts have been concentrated on integrating these data into the PACRAIN rainfall database. Now that this is mostly complete, the focus can shift to analysis and research.

Foremost, it is important to verify that these new TBG data are reliable. Comparison to data from co-located manual gauges will be done where possible. However, the number of these twin-gauge sites is small, and the manual gauges are primarily used for daily observations so the temporal resolution will be very limited. Another source of comparison data that can be used for TBG sites is the 3B42 dataset from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), which has a horizontal resolution of 0.25 degrees and a temporal resolution of 3 hours. The data from each gauge will also be examined in isolation to discover problems like double-tipping and other instrument errors.

Research using the TBG data is already being undertaken. For example, the data from Fua'amotu, Tonga are being used to create a statistical point process model. The model can be used to generate high-resolution (down to 5-minute) synthetic data for applications such as hydrologic process modeling.