Rain height and surface temperature variations for Nigeria

Abstract

There is paucity of data on direct attenuation measurement in the tropics due to rainfall along the earth-space links. Most of the studies reported in the literature have been carried out in temperate regions where solid precipitation is common; therefore there is need to supplement the meagre data available in the tropical regions. It is also well-known that most of the mi-crowave signal attenuation occurs above the 10 GHz (X-band). Rain height data were obtained from the Tropical Rainfall Measur-ing Mission (TRMM) 3B43 V6 satellite while those of the surface temperature data were sourced from AIRS satellite for 37 stations in Nigeria as reported in the literature. Additional data used in this study include the monthly temperature measurements as also reported in the literature. Subsequently, these data have been analyzed to establish the statistical correlation between the 00C iso-therm heights and the surface temperature for 0.01% of the time. Results of the rain height and temperature variations presented in this letter suggest latitude dependence rather than variations based on longitudinal positions of the stations. More so, the ana-lyzed results have shown that the southern region experience rainy season a month and two months earlier than the middle-belt and northern regions respectively. Additionally, the study presents empirical relationship between rain height and surface tem-perature, which may be useful in the estimation of slant path attenuation for design of satellite communication equipment and link budget analysis.