Cumulative distributions of rainfall rate over Sumatra

Abstract

The microwave radio links above 5GHz suffer from attenuation due to precipitation. The need for employing higher frequencies has therefore encouraged research into rain attenuation due to precipitation. The natural variations of tropical precipitation occur in a wide range of time-scales, so does probably the behavior of radio communication links. This paper examines the variations of cumulative distribution of rainfall in Sumatra from an optical rain gauge measurement with a near continuous record of operation over eleven consecutive years (2002-2012). The worst month statistics were also examined and all results were compared with the ITU-R model. Of some natural variations of rainfall rate investigated, the diurnal variation had the most significant effect on the cumulative distribution of rainfall rate. The ITU-R model overestimated the rainfall rate for the first half of the day (00:00-11:59 LT) whereas it underestimated the rainfall rate until 0.01% of time for the second half of the day (12:00-23:59 LT) before the model starts to overestimate. The ITU model overestimated 52.85% of rainfall rate at 0.01% of time for the first half of the day and underestimates 7.59% for the second half. Considerable differences between the recorded data and the ITU-R model for the annual, seasonal, and s variations are only significant at small time percentage (≤ 0.01%). The relationship of worst month statistics was also slightly different from the ITU-R model. This result reinforces the previous studies on the limitation of the ITU-R model for the tropical region.