Rainfall eld reconstruction using rain attenuation of microwave mesh networks

Abstract

Rainfall detection using commercial communication links can complement the existing weather satellite and radar system. Using the rain attenuation data from these networks, the paper proposes a new method of reconstructing the rainfall field through a compressed-sensing based algorithm. Compressed sensing is a new algorithm that can reconstruct a sparse signal from a relatively small number of measurements. System configurations of two links and three links crossing a single area are studied and the detection accuracies for rain location and attenuation level are evaluated. The proposed method is also tested for different climate and weather patterns. The results show that the proposed method has good location detection accuracy, and the rain intensity was reconstructed as well. The proposed detection system and reconstruction method can greatly benefit the tropical countries that experience frequent rains but do not have enough resources for weather forecasting and detection of possible disaster-inducing rain events.