Rainfall Monitoring Using a Microwave Links Network: A Long-Term Experiment in East China

The first long-term rainfall monitoring experiment using the commercial microwave links (CMLs) network in East China is introduced. The network, located in Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province, consists of 49 links with frequencies ranging from 15 GHz to 26 GHz and lengths from 1.14 km to 4.78 km. An OTT PARSIVEL disdrometer is deployed to refine the local rain-induced attenuation relationship, and the CML observations are compared simultaneously with five rain gauges. The inversion parameters of the CML are optimized by minimizing the error of the accumulated rainfall of historical rainfall events. The inversion results show that the daily accumulated rainfall retrieved by the CMLs agrees well with the rain gauge measurements. As an opportunistic approach to monitor near-surface rainfall with high spatiotemporal representativeness and accuracy, the CML network can be used to monitor and forecast urban flood disasters, especially in regions where the widepread deployment of conventional meteorological instruments is impractical.