Reconstruction of Rainfall Field Using Earth–Space Links Network: A Compressed Sensing Approach

Abstract

High-precision rainfall information is of great importance for the improvement of the accuracy of numerical weather prediction and the monitoring of floods and mudslides that affect human life. With the rapid development of satellite constellation networks, there is great potential for reconstructing high-precision rainfall fields in large areas by using widely distributed Earth–space link (ESL) networks. In this paper, we have carried out research on reconstructing high-precision rainfall fields using an ESL network with the compressed sensing (CS) method in the case of a sparse distribution of the ESLs. Firstly, ESL networks with different densities are designed using the K-means clustering algorithm. The real rainfall fields are then reconstructed using the designed ESL networks with CS, and the reconstructed results are compared with that of the inverse distance weighting (IDW) algorithm. The results show that the root mean square error (RMSE) and correlation coefficient (CC) of the reconstructed rainfall fields using the ESL network with CS are lower than 0.15 mm/h and higher than 0.999, respectively, when the density is 0.05 links per square kilometer, indicating that the ESL network with CS is capable of reconstructing the high-precision rainfall fields under sparse sampling. Additionally, the performance of reconstructing the rainfall fields using the ESL networks with CS is superior compared to the reconstructed results of the IDW algorithm.