Design and Evaluation of the Application for a Measurement of Rainfall via Microwave Links

Commercial microwave links (CMLs) can be utilized as an effective opportunistic sensor network for rainfall measurement in both metropolitan and also countrywide deployments. However, there can be various obstacles that can be overcome by several possible methods, e.g. the effect of wet antenna attenuation (WAA). This paper describes the creation of an automated rainfall calculation software tool called Telcorain based on the existing pycomlink library. Telcorain enables end users to easily change the parameters of each step of the rainfall calculation process and switch between various processing methods. The example calculations with use of the created Telcorain application have been performed for the three rain events which took place in the metropolitan area of Prague in March and August of the 2021, using the source data from the large local CML network with 119 CMLs included in the calculations. These results are validated against data from 4 rain gauges operated by Czech Hydrometeorological Institute.