Small Scale Rain Field Sensing and Tomographic Reconstruction with Passive Geostationary Satellite Receivers

László Csurgai-Horváth

doi:10.3390/rs12244161

Abstract

Sensing of the rain rate and the movement of the rain field over a relatively small geographical area may often be necessary for agricultural purposes, water management objectives or transport management in airports or harbors. In this paper, an entirely passive method is suggested to sense rainfall rate and extension of a rain field, with reconstruction in two dimensions using a tomographic method. In order to achieve this goal, multiple colocated satellite receivers are proposed to measure the beacon signal levels of geostationary satellites received at different azimuth angles. The tomographic reconstruction of the rain field takes the advantage of the dis-placement of the rain field due to the movement of air masses, while the rain intensity along the receiving path is estimated by the attenuation of the radio signal between the satellite and the ground receiver. To realize the proposed system, a complete receiver setup and an existing, operational group of satellites are selected. A widely known rain field modeling method is applied to generate test data and evaluate the system. The feasibility of a technically realizable system is provided, and its capabilities are compared with a hypothetical, ideal system. The methods and algorithms are tested on an existing geographical location, simulating a real operating environment.

Highlights

The distribution of rain intensity and the amount of rain fallen over a specific area during a given time is important information and has significance in various application areas
The novelty of this work is that an existing set of geostationary satellites is applied to validate the method, a proven rain cell model is used to simulate a rain field in order to test the quality of the tomographic reconstruction and a feasible system is proposed and tested by simulations within a real geographical location
The beacon signal transmitted by the satellite serves as a beam source, while the linear movement of the detector is represented by the displacement of the rain field

Summary

Introduction

The distribution of rain intensity and the amount of rain fallen over a specific area during a given time is important information and has significance in various application areas. The drainage of precipitation requires a thorough design of the sewer network that can be planned by using long-term statistics and knowledge about the local behavior of rainfall [2]. This is especially important because climate change is significantly influencing the constraints of civil engineering designs. Airports are important examples where rapid rain intensity changes around the runways are interesting in terms of air traffic control

Methods

Results

Conclusion