Technical note: A simple feedforward artificial neural network for high-temporal-resolution rain event detection using signal attenuation from commercial microwave links

Abstract

Two simple feedforward neural networks (multilayer perceptrons – MLPs) are trained to detect rainfall events using signal attenuation from commercial microwave links (CMLs) as predictors and high-temporal-resolution reference data as the target. MLPGA is trained against nearby rain gauges, and MLPRA is trained against gauge-adjusted weather radar. Both MLPs were trained on 26 CMLs and tested on 843 CMLs, all located within 5 km of a rain gauge. Our results suggest that these MLPs outperform existing methods, effectively capturing the intermittent behaviour of rainfall. This study is the first to use both radar and rain gauges for training and testing CML rainfall detection. While previous studies have mainly focused on hourly reference data, our findings show that it is possible to classify rainy and dry time steps with a higher temporal resolution.