Reconstruction of vertical rainfall fields using satellite communication links

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to reconstruct the vertical plane of a rainfall field using rain attenuation of satellite signal links. With received signals at multiple ground stations form multiple satellites, linear least squares is employed to reconstruct the the rain attenuation, thereby the rainfall maps. We use a synthetic super-cell event as our reconstruction target and firstly propose a simple model to simulate satellite link attenuation caused by the rain event. Simulation results suggest that the reconstruction is successful when two satellite-receiver pairs are employed.