Introducing an effect of climate change into globals models of rain fade on telecommunications links

Rain attenuation limits the performance of microwave telecommunication links functioning above approximately 5 GHz. Recent studies have revealed that over the last twenty years the occurrence of rain, at intensities that cause outage on terrestrial links, has experienced a strongly increasing trend in the UK. Globally, the height of rain events has also been observed to increase, which may compound increasing trends in rain fade experienced by Earth-Space communication systems. These climatic changes are almost certainly having significant effect on the performance of existing radio systems, and need to be taken into consideration when planning future systems. The International Telecommunication Union – Radio Section (ITU-R), maintains a set of internationally accepted models for the engineering and regulation of radio systems globally. Although under constant revision, these models assume that atmospheric fading is stationary. This assumption is inherent in the way models are tested.In this project, a method is developed to estimate global trends in one of the most fundamental parameters to the ITU-R models: the one-minute rain rate exceeded for 0.01% of an average year. This method introduces climate change into the ITU-R model of this parameter: Rec. ITU-R P.837. The new model is tested using a method that does not make a stationary climate assumption. Salonen-Poiares Baptista distribution, which is the fundamental method for developing ITU-R Rec. P.837 has been tested using UK Environment Agency data, but no correlations was found between measured annual accumulations and distribution parameters. Nonetheless a link was found between mean annual total precipitations (MT) and rain exceeded at larger time percentages such as; 0.1% and 1%