Estimating Water Vapor Using Signals from Microwave Links below 25 GHz

Abstract

Water vapor is a key element in both the greenhouse effect and the water cycle. However, water vapor has not been well studied due to the limitations of conventional monitoring instruments. Recently, estimating rain rate by the rain-induced attenuation of commercial microwave links (MLs) has been proven to be a feasible method. Similar to rainfall, water vapor also attenuates the energy of MLs. Thus, MLs also have the potential of estimating water vapor. This study proposes a method to estimate water vapor density by using the received signal level (RSL) of MLs at 15, 18, and 23 GHz, which is the first attempt to estimate water vapor by MLs below 20 GHz. This method trains a sensing model with prior RSL data and water vapor density by the support vector machine, and the model can directly estimate the water vapor density from the RSLs without preprocessing. The results show that the measurement resolution of the proposed method is less than 1 g/m3. The correlation coefficients between automatic weather stations and MLs range from 0.72 to 0.81, and the root mean square errors range from 1.57 to 2.31 g/m3. With the large availability of signal measurements from communications operators, this method has the potential of providing refined data on water vapor density, which can contribute to research on the atmospheric boundary layer and numerical weather forecasting.