Rainfall Retrieval Through Commercial Microwave Links in Valmalenco (North Italy)

The signals transmitted across commercial microwave links used for cellular base station backhauling can be opportunistically processed to retrieve rainfall. In this work, we assess the potential and limitations of this technique when applied in a particularly hostile Alpine environment (Valmalenco, northern Italy). To this purpose, we exploit time series of transmitted and received power gathered by a network of operational links and compare the results with measurements performed with rain gauges and disdrometers and assumed here as the ground truth.