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| Titel |
Measuring urban rainfall using microwave links |
| VerfasserIn |
Aart Overeem, Hidde Leijnse, Remko Uijlenhoet |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2011
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 13 (2011) |
| Datensatznummer |
250057576
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| Zusammenfassung |
| The estimation of rainfall using commercial microwave links is a new and promising
measurement technique. Commercial link networks cover large parts of the land surface of
the earth and have a high density, particularly in urban areas. Rainfall attenuates the
electromagnetic signals transmitted between antennas within this network. This attenuation
can be calculated from the difference between the received powers with and without rain and
is a measure of the path-averaged rainfall intensity. This study uses a large, 18-day data set of
on average 33 single-frequency links from 2009 to estimate rainfall in the Rotterdam region,
a densely populated urban area in The Netherlands (~ 700 km2, > 0.5 million
inhabitants), a delta city. A methodology is proposed in which nearby links are used to
remove signal fluctuations that are not related to rainfall, in order to be able to
reliably identify wet and dry weather spells. Subsequently, received signal powers are
converted to rainfall intensities taking into account the temporal sampling protocol and
attenuation due to wet antennas. Link-based rainfall depths are compared with those
based on radar data. In addition, the rainfall retrieval algorithm is applied to an
independent data set of 10 rainy days in 2010 with on average 11 single-frequency links
in the same region. Rainfall retrievals are compared against gauge-adjusted radar
rainfall estimates over the link path. Moreover, the retrieval algorithm is also tested
using high-resolution research link data to investigate the algorithm’s sensitivity
to temporal rainfall variations. All presented comparisons confirm the quality of
commercial microwave link data for quantitative precipitation estimation over urban areas. |
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