Maximum Rain-Rate Evaluations in Aegean Archipelagos Hellas for Rain Attenuation Modeling at Microwave Frequencies

By utilizing meteorological data such as relative humidity, temperature, pressure, rain rate and precipitation duration at eight (8) stations in Aegean Archipelagos from six recent years (2007 – 2012), the effect of the weather on electromagnetic (EM) wave propagation is studied. The EM wave propagation characteristics depend on atmospheric refractivity and consequently on Rain-Rate which vary in time and space randomly. Therefore the statistics of radio refractivity, Rain-Rate and related propagation effects are of main interest. This work investigates the maximum value of rain rate in monthly rainfall records, for a 5 min interval comparing it with different values of integration time as well as different percentages of time. The main goal is to determine the attenuation level for microwave links based on local rainfall data for various sites in Greece (L-zone), namely Aegean Archipelagos, with a view on improved accuracy as compared with more generic zone data available. A measurement of rain attenuation for a link in the S-band has been carried out and the data compared with prediction based on the standard ITU-R method.