Prediction of Rain Attenuation in Terrestrial Links with the Full Rainfall Rate Distribution

This paper presents a method for predicting the cumulative distribution of rain attenuation in terrestrial links that uses the full rainfall rate distribution as input for the calculations, providing significant improvement in prediction accuracy over the method currently recommended by the ITU-R. Although semi-empirical, the method retains two important features of the ITU-R method: the concept of an equivalent rain cell and the dependency on frequency based on theoretically derived expressions for the specific attenuation.