Dependence of rain-rate distribution on rain-gauge integration time

An important problem in designing terrestrial and earth-satellite radio systems at frequencies above 10 GHz is the radio outage caused by rain attenuation. Since rain-rate statistics vary significantly from year to year, long-term rain-rate distributions are needed in radio path engineering to meet a given reliability objective. This paper and Ref. 2 together describe a method and the necessary data sources to obtain 20-year distributions of 5-min rain rates at about 250 locations in the U. S. A.