Preliminary study of EUMETSAT’s Multi-Sensor Precipitation Estimate product for microwave links in Malaysia

Abstract

High frequency radio links tend to suffer losses due to hydrometeors. Rain is among the largest contributor to these types of losses and is known to cause most outages on microwave links. Rainfall rate is one of the crucial parameters for radio engineers to calculate and predict attenuation on radio links due to rain. This paper studies the potential of rainfall rate acquired from EUMETSAT’s Multi-Sensor Precipitation Estimate (MPE) weather satellite product to be exploited for designing microwave links in Malaysia. Rainfall rate distributions from EUMETSAT’s MPE, ITU-R model and rain gauge are compared for verification purposes.