Atmospheric Attenuation due to Humidity

Humidity remains in the atmosphere even on bright days. Water of all three states can be found naturally in the atmosphere: liquid (rain, fog, and clouds), solid (snowflakes, ice crystals), and gas (water vapour). Water in any state is an obstacle in the link of the electromagnetic wave. When the wave passes through the water particles, a part of its energy is absorbed and a part is scattered. Therefore the electromagnetic wave is attenuated. Prediction of the influence of these factors is very important in radio system design. Attenuation due to rain, fog, and clouds can lead to the perturbations of the wireless, mobile, satellite and other communications. Another problem is the refractive index of the atmosphere, which affects the curvature of the electromagnetic wave path and gives some insight into the fading phenomenon. The anomalous electromagnetic wave propagation can cause disturbances to radar work, because variation of the refractive index of the atmosphere can induce loss of radar coverage. Accurate prediction of losses due to these factors can ensure a reliability of the radio system, decrease an equipment cost, furthermore, the radio systems can become less injurious to health of people. When there are no possibilities to gather data for calculations of the specific attenuation due to rain, clouds and fog, and atmospheric refractive index, the values recommended by the International Communication Union’s Radiocommunication sector (ITU-R) can be used. But the recommended values are not always exact. In design of the radio links, the most desirable operating frequencies are below 10 GHz, because in such cases atmospheric absorption and rainfall loss may generally be neglected (Freeman, 2007). However, in most countries, the frequency-band below 10 GHz is highly congested. In addition, high frequencies provide larger bandwidth, narrower beam width, good resolution and smaller component size (Bhattacharyya et al., 2000). Therefore, the operating frequencies of 10 GHz and above are often used in design of radio systems. The higher the operating frequency, the greater attenuation due to hydrometeors (rain, cloud, fog, snow, and etc.) is observed (Tamošiūnaitė et al., 2010a). In (Ishimaru, 1978), it was mentioned that the electromagnetic wave attenuation due to snow is less than attenuation due to rain, and that the attenuation due to dry snow may be neglected