Abstract A new method is presented for estimating the space-time rainfall intensity distribution at ground level over a limited area. This is based on a tomographic technique that exploits the relationship between microwave attenuation and rainfall intensity. At each time step, the spatial distribution of rainfall intensity is calculated from a set of path-integrated microwave attenuation measurements, performed over the monitored area. A set of bilinear basis functions is used to reconstruct the rainfall space distribution from discrete samples. A recursive optimization technique is applied to solve the ill-conditioned system of linear algebraic equations providing the searched solution at each time stop, thus, obtaining an estimate of space-time distribution of rainfall intensity. This method is analyzed using computer simulated data, and various results are shown that validate the proposed tomographic technique. In particular a rainfall event is simulated over a 20 × 20 km2 plane area, assuming that pr...