Commercial Microwave Links (CML) are used for telecommunication, but can also be used as opportunistic sensors to measure evaporation and precipitation. Whereas rainfall can be obtained by analyzing the attenuation of the received signal due to waterdrops, evaporation can be achieved by analyzing the scintillation fluctuations caused by the surface fluxes. Thus CMLs are potentially an additional source of ground-based observations of the two major hydrological fluxes.

Papers on this topic:

van der Valk, L. D., Hartogensis, O. K., Coenders-Gerrits, M., Hut, R. W., and Uijlenhoet, R.: Evaporation measurements using commercial microwave links as scintillometers, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 29, 6589–6606, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-29-6589-2025, 2025.

van der Valk, L. D., Hartogensis, O. K., Coenders-Gerrits, M., Hut, R. W., Walraven, B., and Uijlenhoet, R.: Use of commercial microwave links as scintillometers: potential and limitations towards evaporation estimation, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 18, 6143–6165, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-18-6143-2025, 2025.

Walraven, B., A. Overeem, M. Coenders-Gerrits, R. Hut, L. van der Valk, and R. Uijlenhoet, 2024: Relating Rainfall Retrieval Parameters to Network and Environmental Features to Improve Rainfall Estimates from Commercial Microwave Links in the Tropics. J. Hydrometeor., 25, 1769–1791, https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-24-0023.1.

van der Valk, L. D., Coenders-Gerrits, M., Hut, R. W., Overeem, A., Walraven, B., and Uijlenhoet, R.: Measuring rainfall using microwave links: the influence of temporal sampling, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 17, 2811–2832, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-17-2811-2024, 2024.