Abstract
Commercial microwave link (MWL) used by mobile telecom operators for data transmission can provide hydro-meteorologically valid rainfall estimates according to studies in the past decade. For the first time, this study investigated a new method, the MSG technique, that uses Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite data to improve MWL rainfall estimates. The investigation, conducted during daytime, used MSG optical (VIS0.6) and near IR (NIR1.6) data to estimate rain areas along a 15 GHz, 9.88 km MWL for classifying the MWL signal into wet–dry periods and estimate the baseline level. Additionally, the MSG technique estimated a new parameter, wet path length, representing the length of the MWL that was wet during wet periods. Finally, MWL rainfall intensity estimates from this new MSG and conventional techniques were compared to rain gauge estimates. The results show that the MSG technique is robust and can estimate gauge comparable rainfall estimates. The evaluation scores every three hours of RMSD, relative bias, and r2 based on the entire evaluation period results of the MSG technique were 2.61 mm h−1, 0.47, and 0.81, compared to 2.09 mm h−1, 0.04, and 0.84 of the conventional technique, respectively. For convective rain events with high intensity spatially varying rainfall, the results show that the MSG technique may approximate the actual mean rainfall estimates better than the conventional technique.
Highlights
A commercial microwave link (MWL) is a communication between two antennas usually installed on telephone towers or roofs of buildings by mobile telecom service providers for data transmission from radio, TV, internet, and wireless communication between our cell phones [1,2,3]
Performance metrics computed based on all the 15 min intervals in the MWL received signal levels (RSL) data evaluate the accuracy of the new technique for MWL rainfall intensity estimation
From Raw RSL to Rainfall Intensity Estimates: A Comparison of the Conventional and Figure 3 demonstrates the transformation of the mean RSL to rainfall intensities and its comparison with the actual mean intensities from rain gauges according to the conventional and Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) techniques
Summary
A commercial microwave link (MWL) is a communication between two antennas (i.e., transmitter and receiver antennas) usually installed on telephone towers or roofs of buildings by mobile telecom service providers for data transmission from radio, TV, internet, and wireless communication between our cell phones [1,2,3]. MWL uses 10 GHz–80 GHz frequency ranges for data transmission, which are attenuated mainly by rainfall such that the more intense the rainfall, the stronger the MWL experiences attenuation. For this reason, previous studies pioneered by [4,5] have investigated and converted the MWL signal to hydro-meteorological valid rainfall estimates. The MWL signal data have been studied for estimating rainfall for many applications, e.g., [6,7,8,9,10,11]. In Africa, [8,9] investigated the MWL data’s potential for providing valuable rainfall information for agricultural needs and [10,11]
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