Click here to go to our page on atmospheric breakdown
Click here to go to our page on atmospheric pressure
Click here to go to our main radar page
Click here to go to our page on radiometers
click here to go to our radar range equation page
Click here to go to our basic concepts of microwave engineering page
Atmospheric attenuation affects radar, communications and remote sensing, it is your job to know how to take this into account.
Update December 2025. We have a new attenuation graphic thanks to Jacob.
Boulder Environmental Sciences and Technology develops and fabricates microwave radiometers, passive microwave sensors for environmental observations. The owner of this company is Dr. Marian Klein. He is an expert in atmospheric science and remote sensing via microwave radiometry. His PhD thesis was at Technical University of Košice, Slovakia, contains the plot shown below. We have been informed that it is OK to copy it so long as you give him credit!
Here are links to Dr. Klein's company, and his awesome attenuation plot:
https://boulderest.com/about-us/
https://boulderest.com/clear-air-atmospheric-attenuation/
You can find him on LinkedIn
Dr. Klein’s company is a very small R&D outfit, and he’s always trying to raise awareness for his company .and its cause at conferences like IMS, AMS, IGARSS, etc. Look him up if you are interested in radiometers
Below, we leave the original plot we had on the site for over a decade., so you can see how much more comprehensive Dr. Kelin's data is.
Below is the classic attenuation figure that dates back to at least 1968, in Bean and Dutton's Radio Meteorology: You should be familiar with the water absorption bands at 22, 183 and 323 GHz, and the oxygen absorption regions at 60 and 118 GH, so why not print this plot out and hang it in your cube right now? These regions have higher attenuation, which is not always a bad thing, if you want your signal to die off at close distances, like for example the 4G applications (you don't want the neighbors accessing all of your wireless transmissions, do you?)
The A and B lines are for two types of weather (case A is rain). Update May 2013: Michael sent us an improved graphic which he created by hand tracing the original, which is shown below. Thanks!
Here the original chart, the exact origin of this fuzzy artwork is unknown.