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.
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.
