Abstract
Abstract. Urban floods due to intense precipitation is a major problem in many developing countries, especially in Africa. There are few available solutions for effective and yet affordable flood early warning systems for these regions. Weather radar is common in industrialized countries but too costly for most tropical cities. Satellite provides interesting information in real time but not yet quantitative enough at the space and time scales needed for urban flood monitoring. Rainfall measurement using commercial microwave links (CML) from cellular communication networks is a cost effective alternative to conventional methods. The method is based on measuring rain induced fluctuations between telecommunication antennas; if the operator provides this information rain maps can be produced and used for hydrological prediction. Many CML studies have been carried out in Europe and Israel. Recently IRD implemented pilot sites in Africa in order to test this rainfall estimation technique and quantify the uncertainties. After reviewing the method principles and providing an overview of the current research on CML, we present a simulation framework to analyse the propagation of CML rainfall uncertainties in an urban hydrological model.
Highlights
Rainfall measurement by commercial microwave links (CML) is based on the robust relationship between microwave signal attenuation and rainfall intensity over the link
Satellite provides interesting information in real time but not yet quantitative enough at the space and time scales needed for urban flood monitoring
Rainfall measurement by CML is based on the robust relationship between microwave signal attenuation and rainfall intensity over the link
Summary
Research on rainfall measurement from CML started in 2003 in the Netherlands and Israel, later followed by several international research groups. The first papers focused on the method feasibility at link scale (Messer et al, 2006) and on the uncertainties (Leijnse et al, 2007; Berne and Uijlenhoet, 2007). We introduce a simulation framework develop to analyse the potential of this technique for urban hydrology, accounting for rainfall uncertainty propagation. Several studies have analysed and quantified the uncertainties in CMLs’ rainfall estimation, for different network configuration and rainfall regime (Berne and Uijlenhoet, 2007; Leijnse et al, 2007, 2008a, b, 2010; Zinevich et al, 2010; Schleiss et al, 2013; van Leth et al, 2017). A simulation framework has been set up in order to analyse how typical errors in CMLs rainfall estimation may propagate within a hydrological model. The radar rain fields were obtained from a campaign that took place in Ouagadougou in 2012 and 2013 (http://meghatropiques. ipsl.polytechnique.fr/the-ouagadougou-super-site/, last access: 12 August 2020)
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