Application of commercial microwave links (CMLs) attenuation for quantitative estimation of precipitation

Abstract

Precipitation estimation models are typically sourced by rain gauges, weather radars and satellite observations. A relatively new technique of precipitation estimation relies on the network of Commercial Microwave Links (CMLs) employed for cellular communication networks: the rain-inducted attenuation in the links enables the precipitation estimation. In the paper, it is analysed to what extent the precipitation derived from CML attenuation data is useful in estimation of the precipitation field with the high temporal and spatial resolution required in nowcasting models. Two methods of determination of precipitation along CMLs from attenuation of signal with several frequencies were proposed. Then, in order to generate precipitation field, three approaches for assigning appropriate precipitation values to a specific point or set of pixels along the link are developed and tested. The CML-based estimates are compared with point observations from manual rain gauges and multi-source precipitation fields using daily and half-hourly accumulations. It was found that the CML-based precipitation fields are much worse than radar-derived estimates. At the same time, they had slightly poorer reliability than spatially interpolated telemetric rain gauge data and significantly higher reliability than satellite estimates. Furthermore, the impact of link characteristics, such as length and frequency, on the reliability of CML-based precipitation estimates is analysed.