Tipping Bucket Data Processing for Propagation Application

To predict outage due to rain attenuation at millimeter wavelengths, propagation prediction models require rain rate averaged over one minute. Recently several tipping bucket rain gauges do not measure rain rate; they provide only a rough estimate of the quantity of water accumulated in one minute by counting the number of tips. In this paper we propose a new algorithm to extract rain rate from data gathered with modern raingauges, and test its performance against an extensive database collected over a period of eight years.