A STATISTICAL DESCRIPTION OF INTENSE RAINFALL

This paper contains a statistical summary of the 14,000,000 measurements taken during 27 rainfalls in a six‐month period in 1967 from a 96‐station, rapid‐response rain guage network spread over a rectangular area 13 by 14 kilometers centered near Crawford Hill, New Jersey. The analysis emphasizes rain rates greater than 50 millimeters per hour, which interfere with radio transmission in the 10 to 30 GHz frequency range. Heavy rain rates are relatively rare events, come in irregular bursts, and do not appear amenable to description by simple analytic distributions. This paper presents statistics concerning the behavior of rain rates at a point in space, the relationship of rain rates separated in space or time, and the relationship of average rain rates on pairs of paths in various configurations. © 1969 The Bell System Technical Journal