HYCELL—A new hybrid model of the rain horizontal distribution for propagation studies: 2. Statistical modeling of the rain rate field

Abstract

[1] A methodology to simulate typical two-dimensional rain rate fields over an observation area A o of a few tens up to a few hundreds of square kilometers (i.e., the scale of a satellite telecommunication beam or a terrestrial Broadband Wireless Access network) is proposed. The scenes generated account for the climatological characteristics intrinsic to the simulation area A o . The methodology consists of the conglomeration of rain cells modeled by HYCELL and of two analytical expressions of the rain cell spatial density, both derived from the statistical distribution of the rain cell size. The scene generating requires, as an input parameter, the local Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of the rain rate, a meteorological data commonly available throughout the world. The rain rate field is then generated numerically, according to an iterative scheme, under the constraint of accurately reproducing the local CDF intrinsic to the simulation area A o , and following rigorously the rain cell spatial density. All the potentialities of the HYCELL model are thus used in order to generate a two-dimensional scene having a mixed composition of hybrid, gaussian, and exponential cells accounting for the local climatological characteristics. Various scenes are then simulated throughout the world, showing the ability of the method to reproduce the local CDF, with a mean error, with respect to the rain rate distribution, smaller than 1.86%, whatever the location, that is, whatever the climatology. It is suggested that this statistical modeling of the rain rate field horizontal structure be used as a tool by system designers to evaluate, at any location of the world, diversity gain, terrestrial path attenuation, or slant path attenuation for different azimuth and elevation angle directions.INDEX TERMS: 3354 Meteorology and Atmospheric Dynamics: Precipitation (1854); 3210 Mathematical Geophysics: Modeling; 3360 Meteorology and Atmospheric Dynamics: Remote sensing; 6964 Radio Science: Radio wave propagation; KEYWORDS: propagation in rain, radar meteorology, rain modeling Citation: Féral, L., H. Sauvageot, L. Castanet, and J. Lemorton, HYCELL-A new hybrid model of the rain horizontal distribution for propagation studies: 2. Statistical modeling of the rain rate field,

HYCELL—A new hybrid model of the rain horizontal distribution for propagation studies: 1. Modeling of the rain cell

“…Moreover, HYCELL should be a powerful tool to compute many propagation parameters. HYCELL is, for example, the basis of a new methodology of two-dimensional scene generating whose statistical properties follow the local climatology [Féral et al, 2003].…”

Extension of the Misme and Fimbel model for the estimation of the cumulative distribution function of the differential rain attenuation between two converging terrestrial links

“…In addition to received signal levels, the rainfall rate data were also acquired at ECL and RIS. The two data sets were processed, Several authors performed rain cell size measurements using meteorological radars located in temperate regions [17]- [20], and a high-elevation slant path at a tropical site [21]. Some of the results were presented in the form of a functional relation between the average cell diameter and the rainfall rate and seem to be in reasonable agreement with the assumed values for parameters β and d o of the model represented by expression (1).…”

Estimation of packet losses due to propagation impairments: Application to TCP performance over satellite

“…This advantage becomes even greater as the initial rain attenuation reaches higher values. An important conclusion concerning Figures 2-4 is that the initial rain attenuation affects significantly the average packet-error burst, as already suggested by (19). This is especially important for system-specific protocol design that utilizes channel state information (CSI).…”

“…In this case, the CDF of the rain attenuation is divided by PrfA50:5g; as suggested in [19]. Note that 0.5 dB is the minimum detectable value of rain attenuation.…”