Speaker
Description
The difficulty of deploying dense networks of rain gauges in urban areas due to installation and maintenance costs, as well as the spatial structure of cities, particularly in Africa, makes it challenging to monitor the impact of extreme rainfall events. Flood risk management and urban hydrological modeling require accurate information on the spatial and temporal distribution of precipitation.
This study presents a rather unique and innovative experimental device in Sub-Saharan Africa which, in addition to some twenty rain gauges, disdrometers, and limnimeters, combines three opportunistic rain measurement technologies: commercial microwave links (CMLs) from mobile phone networks, satellite-to-ground microwave links (SMLs) from television satellites, and acoustic sensors that measure rainfall based on the sound generated by raindrops falling on a given surface. Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of these opportunistic systems for detecting and estimating rainfall based on the attenuation of the microwave signal by raindrops.
After describing this unique observation network, our analysis shows the contribution of opportunistic measurements in general for a city like Abidjan, which is prone to annual flooding, and CMLs in particular through hydrological modeling already evaluated on SMLs.
Keywords: RainCell, CMLs, SMLs, sounds, urban hydrology, West Africa