The effects of climate change on microwave telecommunications

Microwave telecommunications links operating above 10 GHz are severely faded by rain. Recently trends have been identified in rain parameters that directly effect the performance of these links. In the UK, the incidence of rain at outage levels for terrestrial links has been experiencing an increasing trend over the last twenty years. Many links would have seen the underlying incidence of outage double or triple over this period. Globally, rain height has also been increasing as the world has warmed. This leads to an increasing trend in rain fade experienced by Earth-space links. In some areas of the world these effects will be combining to cause steep increases in the levels of fading experienced by Earth-space links. These effects will need to be taken into account when designing future microwave systems with life-expectancies longer than a decade or two. ITU-R recommendations that currently assume a stationary climate will need to be modified or replaced to embed climate change into data analysis and predictive models.