Analysis of Selected Earth-Space Rain Attenuation Models for a Tropical Station

Abstract

The restrained use of millimeter bands is due to severe rain attenuation. Attenuation is caused when rain cells intersects radio wave’s propagation path; resulting in deep fades. The effect of rainfall is more severe in tropical regions characterized by heavy rainfall intensity and large raindrops; hence, rain attenuation analyses are essential to study rain fade characteristics for use in earth-space link budget analysis, for outage prediction resulting from rain attenuation. Tropical regions are particularly challenged with signal outage, necessitating the formulation and development of suitable prediction model(s) for the region. Therefore, extensive knowledge of the propagation phenomena mitigating system availability and signal quality in these bands are required. Daily rainfall data were collected from the Nigerian Meteorological Services for Lagos for spanning January to December 2010. Results showed that although, the ITU-R model out-performed the other prediction models under consideration, none of prediction models matched the measurement data.