A New Approach to Precipitation Monitoring: A critical survey of existing technologies and challenges

Accurate measurements of precipitation are essential for many applications, ranging from flash-flood warnings to water resource management. However, the accuracy of the existing tools is limited by various technical and practical reasons. Percipitation monitoring has traditionally been known to rely on gauges, weather radars, and satellites. Recently, a new approach has begun to be examined, the usage of commercial wireless communication networks (CWCNs), which enjoys the lack of any need for deployment procedures or costs, and which is already widely spread across countries. The goal of this article is to present a critical survey of the existing papers and works on this topic. We emphasize the works relating this topic to multidimensional signal processing. The importance of precipitation (rain, sleet, hail, snow, and any other outcomes of the condensation of water vapor that falls by virtue of gravity) is clear to any layman. Whether it is required for the purpose of precisely measuring past precipitation quantities or for generating future predictions, monitoring such phenomena has been of interest to humankind since early biblical days.