Determination of rain rate distribution and rain cell size from the Malaysian meteorological radar data

Abstract

Future satellite mobile communication systems designed for mobile user applications will use extremely high frequency carriers to provide more capacity and smaller equipment. At these frequencies, the extra attenuation due to rain is a primary cause of communications impairment on satellite-earth paths, especially above 10 GHz. Rain seriously influences the performance of a communications satellite link. The ability of radar to scan a wide area around the radar site and not just a particular path made it a very attractive for many types of investigations. Radar can be used to measure the rainfall rate indirectly. The main objective of this project is to find the rain rate, rain cell size distribution of local rain and compare the rain rate and rain cell size distribution with ITU-R recommendations. For this study, the data for 0.50 elevation angle and 0.5 km range bin is used by Plan Position Indicator (PPI) scan. This project gives the value of two important parameters in microwave or satellite link design. That is the rainfall rate (^o.oi) and the rain cell size (Dom) distributions. The results give an acceptable correlation with the international telecommunication union- radio communication sector (ITU-R) recommendations. The proposed rain rate distribution model can be used to determine the rain at the percentage of interest. This is useful for microwave link system planning and link budget estimation.