Real-Time Rainfall Detection Employing Microwave Satellite Broadcasting Links Observations

In recent years, the occurrence of flash flood events seems increasing all over the world. Flash flooding is a result of heavy localized rainfall such as that from slow moving intense thunderstorms. Such floods often become raging torrents, which rip through riverbeds, valleys, and city streets, and possibly generate extensive damage. To cope with such an event a nowcasting service would be worth to validate weather alerts and to give civil protection offices timely information on the precipitation. A rain monitoring sensor unit based on the measurement of the electromagnetic radiation received by standard antennas used by commercial DVB-S decoders will be employed to that purpose. In particular, the proposed system will be able to estimate in real time the rain rate by inverting the propagation model, which binds it with the signal attenuation of radio signals, namely in the Ku band used for most of the considered satellites (Federici et al.).