Symposium on the hydrometeorological usage of data from commercial microwave link networks

Rainfall estimation from Cellular Networks data based on local climatology.

Jun 26, 2019, 12:10 PM

20m

large seminar room (KIT Campus Alpin)

Oral Specific HyMet CML research topics (presentations on Day2, posters on Day1) Specific research topics

Speaker

Yury Lechinsky (KLL)

Description

The current study proposes a new method to process Commercial Microwave Links (CML) data for rainfall estimation.
Since the concept was introduced in the mid-2000, several papers have discussed and illustrated how rain-induced fluctuations could be used to quantify rainfall.
Most previous work on the subject is based on applying a power-law relationship between the attenuation over the link and rain rate, with the coefficients (a,b) of the relationship being either provided by the ITU, or derived from drop size distribution information for the region of interest.
Our method is based on matching the Intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves derived from CMLs to IDFs derived from rain gauges, comparing statistical characteristics of rainfall.
The calibration of CMLs based on local climatology is conceptually appealing as it does not require direct fitting of estimated rainfall intensity to ground observations and line-integrated rainfall better fit IDF concept
It is therefore also suitable for regions with sparse rain gauge networks, regions where CML rainfall information has the greatest potential to predict rainfall