Maximum Rain-Rate Evaluations in Aegean Archipelagos Hellas for Rain Attenuation Modeling at Microwave Frequencies

Abstract

By utilizing meteorological data such as relative humidity, temperature, pressure, rain rate and precipitation duration at eight (8) stations in Aegean Archipelagos from six recent years (2007 -2012), the effect of the weather on Electromagnetic wave propagation is studied. The EM wave propagation characteristics depend on atmospheric refractivity and consequently on Rain-Rate which vary in time and space randomly. Therefore the statistics of radio refractivity, Rain-Rate and related propagation effects are of main interest. This work investigates the maximum value of rain rate in monthly rainfall records, for a 5 min interval comparing it with different values of integration time as well as different percentages of time. The main goal is to determine the attenuation level for microwave links based on local rainfall data for various sites in Greece (L-zone), namely Aegean Archipelagos, with a view on improved accuracy as compared with more generic zone data available. A measurement of rain attenuation for a link in the S-band has been carried out and the data compared with prediction based on the standard ITU-R method.

A rain estimation model based on microwave signal attenuation measurements in the city of Ioannina, Greece

“…(2009) showed for a 3 dB signal attenuation at 5 GHz for a transmitter–receiver distance of 0.4 km and a 12 mm⋅hr –1 rainfall intensity, which yields a specific signal attenuation of 7.5 dB⋅km –1 . Karagianni et al .ʼs (2016) measurements for moderate rainfall events around 12 mm⋅hr –1 showed a power loss around 12 dBm at 2.4 GHz; supposing that a maximum path loss of 1.6 km was used, this yields specific path attenuation from 7.5 (for the case of maximum wi‐fi distance) to 15 dB⋅km –1 .…”

“…Although these algorithms have been significantly improved over the last decades, they still introduce uncertainties in the estimation of rain, primarily when this estimation is carried out at a very high resolution (Jeon et al, 2019;Reddy et al, 2019). Radar measurements data are burdened with a wide spectrum of errors from different sources which cannot be neglected (Jurczyk et al, 2019). Concerning satellite measurements, the most significant limitation is the indirect character of the retrieval that correlates microphysical and dynamical cloud characteristics with rain amounts at ground level (Levizzani et al, 2001).…”

“…Karagianni et al . (2016) determined the attenuation level for MWLs based on local rain data. Additionally, a measurement of rain attenuation for a link in the S‐band was carried out.…”

Earth-to-Earth Microwave Rain Attenuation Measurements: A Survey On the Recent Literature

“…The effect of weather in electromagnetic wave propagation was studied over the Aegean Sea, Greece using data recorded from stations installed on several islands [73]. The main goal was to evaluate the attenuation level of microwave links based on local rainfall measurements.…”

Rainfall Measurements Due to Radio Frequency Signal Attenuation at 2 GHz

“…Measuring RF signal attenuation through the atmosphere is a complex process that depends on a variety of parameters such as rain, temperature, humidity, multipath propagation, noise and interference. Especially for frequencies below 10 GHz, very few studies have provided measurements and reporting implementation outcomes [5]. The difficulty in such kind of measurements lies particularly in the fact that signal attenuation due to rainfall is very small at such frequencies demanding customized and high accurate measurement setup.…”