Attenuation Effect of Dust Storm on Port Sudan Microwave Signal Level In Comparison With Some Models

Dust storms are significant meteorological phenomena which occur for a percentage of time in arid and semi-arid areas especially at African and Middle East, and this phenomena affect signal attenuation signal level especially at Ku band and higher frequency with direct impact on telecommunications system performance. A study on dust storm effect on Microwave links in arid area covering a wide range of radiofrequency especially in 18GHZwas running in Khartoum, Sudan. The study used Management system (computerized system) for monitoring transmitted and received signal levels of one microwave links operating at (18GHz) as well as an automatic weather station. This paper presents a description of measurement results and reports for dust storms as they affect the radio wave propagation especially at frequencies above 10GHz, for Port Sudan –Dar Elnaeem link in Port Sudan city. The effect of dust storms on propagation is studied by measuring the storm parameters, visibility and attenuation due to these storms. The measurement results have been compared with the attenuation prediction models like Elshaikh and Goldhirsh Model. Few prediction models have been developed to determine the attenuation due to dust storm in dB/km. All prediction models have assumed that the intensity of dust storm is uniformly distributed around the area covered by the dust storm. However, real dust storm is a complex phenomenon which is difficult to be described by theoretical physical or mathematical models. In this work, we compare between the existing attenuation prediction models based on measured dust storm and measured attenuation in Sudan. The empirical relation found that the measured attenuation is higher than the predicted by the models studied. Keywords—Dust Storm, Microwave, Frequency, attenuation, Visibility

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