A radio propagation experiment at the Okinawa Radio Observatory of the Communications Research Laboratory is investigating the feasibility of calibrating the spaceborne precipitation radar onboard the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission by using the path-averaged rainfall rate estimated from rain attenuation. Because this estimated rainfall rate has errors due to the spatial inhomogeneity of rainfall rate and the variability of raindrop size distribution, we used distrometer data to evaluate both of these errors by computer simulation.

The reception level of a round-trip signal from a VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) was monitored continuously for three years starting October 1991.For these experimental measurements, a commercial satellite channel (up-link 14GHz/downlink 12GHz, bandwidth 100kHz) was used and rainfall was measured simultaneously. Data gathering time interval of 2 seconds was adopted to elucidate very rapid variation and lower percentage statistics. In this paper, attenuation due to rainfall is shown using the data obtained in this three-year period. It is shown that so far, the measured rain attenuation agrees very well with the values estimated using the CCIR model, and limits the range where the cumulative time exceeds 0.01%, even for our VSAT system in Tagajo, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan.

A computer-based system for the automatic determination of the physical parameters of rainfall was developed. The measuring device consists of a light source and two TV cameras. Images of raindrops that fell through the slit were observed on a frosted glass plate as shadow images which were photographed simultaneously by two TV cameras with different shutter speeds and analyzed. The data indicated that the shape of raindrops were spheroid in case of small diameter but were slightly deformed into an oblate spheroid in case of larger diameter, and the fall velocity tends to increase with increasing size of raindrops. Rainfall rates calculated from the shape and velocity were compared with those measured directly and found to agree.