Environmental Monitoring by Wireless Communication Networks
Hagit Messer,1
Artem Zinevich,2
Pinhas Alpert3
The global spread of wireless networks brings a great opportunity for their use in environmental studies. Weather, atmospheric conditions, and constituents cause propagation impairments on radio links. As such, while providing communication facilities, existing wireless communication systems can be used as a widely distributed, high-resolution atmospheric observation network, operating in real time with minimum supervision and without additional cost. Here we demonstrate how measurements of the received signal level, which are made in a cellular network, provide reliable measurements for surface rainfall. We compare the estimated rainfall intensity with radar and rain gauge measurements.
1 School of Electrical Engineering, Tel-Aviv University, 69978 Tel-Aviv, Israel.
2 The Porter School of Environmental Studies, Tel-Aviv University, 69978 Tel-Aviv, Israel.
3 Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, 69978 Tel-Aviv, Israel.
