Global Formulation of the Synthetic Storm Technique Oriented to Satellite Link–Budget Design

We have updated the global Synthetic Storm Technique (referred to as the global SST) by reformulating it according to a larger database of rain rate time series collected in several sites in different climatic regions. For each site, the average annual probability distribution of rain attenuation obtained with the global SST, PSST,glo (A), in a slant path, was compared with that given by the full SST, PSST (A), which we have considered as experimental data. The test was performed for frequency ranging from 10 to 100 GHz, for elevation angle θ ranging from 20° to 60° and for annual probabilities 10% to 0.01%. The global SST tends to underestimate the attenuation by approximately 10% for elevation angle θ ≤ 30° and about 20% for 30° < θ < 60° in the probability range 10% to 0.1%, and approximately 15% in the probability range 0.1% to 0.01%. For any probability, the error is zero for θ = 90◦ because at the zenith, the global SST coincides with the full SST.