Estimation of rainfall rate from terrestrial microwave link measurements

The large number of millimetre and microwave terrestrial links that are in operation has lead to the belief that it may be possible to estimate two-dimensional rainfall rate fields. This paper outlines a reconstruction algorithm that can be used to estimate the rainfall field from a number of measurements of path attenuation on terrestrial links. In this paper we adopt a different approach to the regularization of this inverse problem. The main focus of the paper is a description of the retrieval algorithm which is demonstrated through simulation. The approach has been shown to be robust and relatively insensitive to errors and quantisation in the link measurements.