Estimation De La Visibilité Météorologique À L’aide Des Liens Micro-Ondes Commerciaux De Télécommunications

Abstract

Several factors can attenuate radio signal between transmitting and receiving antenna. One can cite: vegetation, atmospheric gases, fog, water vapor, transmission instruments, rain, temperature, etc... The sources of attenuation differ according to the climate and the relief of each continent or even each country. In this work we aim to show that there is link between microwave signal attenuation and weather visibility in the presence of dust. Weather visibility is a very important factor for the safety of road, sea, rail and air transportation. In the presence of dust, the visibility is strongly reduced and there is also a strong attenuation of the microwave signal propagating between two antennas. By performing a linear regression on the attenuation-visibility scatter plot, we propose a method for real-time estimation of the visibility knowing the microwave signals attenuation. A correlation measurement between the visibility estimated by our method from the real attenuation data of the mobile phone operator Telecel Faso SA (Burkina Faso) and the visibility measured by the National Meteorological Agency of Burkina Faso (ANAM) gave a correlation coefficient of 0.86.

Application of Machine Learning Methods on Climate Data and Commercial Microwave Link Attenuations for Estimating Meteorological Visibility in Dusty Condition

“…To our knowledge, very few works in the literature have addressed the problem of estimating meteorological visibility in dusty conditions. In recent work [10], we proposed a linear regression model for estimating the meteorological visibility in dusty conditions, using the attenuation of the microwave signal propagating between two telecommunication antennas. The present study seeks to improve the meteorological visibility estimation model, by taking into account, in addition to the attenuation of commercial microwave links (CML) signal, the following weather parameters: temperature, dew point, wind speed, wind direction, and atmospheric pressure.…”