A Proposed Method for Dust and Sand Storms Effect on Satellite Communication Networks Kamal Harb 1 , Butt Omair, Samir Abdul-Jauwad 2 , Abdullah Al-Yami, and AbdulAziz Al-Yami Electrical Engineering Department, KFUPM University, Saudi Arabia KFUPM University, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia Email: 1- kharb@kfupm.edu.sa; 2- samara@kfupm.edu.sa Abstract—Due to frequent climate changes in our daily atmosphere, the movement of dust and sand storms has become very severe and unpredictable. The climatic vari- ations affect the propagation of high frequency satellite signals. In order to estimate wireless channel signal im- pairments, a system has been modeled based on estimated visibility and volume of dust particulars. A new approach for determining visibility based on duststorm model has been presented. Also, this paper presents a new method to fragment the dust storm into different sections based on variations in visibility at different heights. A three- dimensional relationship is presented for dust and sand attenuation (DUSA) and signal to noise ratio (SNR) to show the variations of dust attenuation with both visibil- ity and dust particle volume at different locations. The re- lationships can be exploited to develop an enhanced back propagation-learning algorithm that can be used to iter- atively tune the controller based on weather conditions and by means of SNR feedback values and other satellite parameters. The algorithm applied to a simulated model for activating the weighted Modulation/Codepoint con- trol showed markedly improvements in ensuring optimal configuration settings for any given service level agree- ment commitment. Index Terms—Decision Support System (DSS), Dust and Sand Storm (DUSA), Duststrom Visibility, Interna- tional Telecommunication Union-Radiocommunications (ITU-R), Quality of Service (QoS), Signal to Noise Ra- tio (SNR). I. Introduction Different weather conditions such as rain, snow, scin- tillation, moisture, sand and dust storms play signifi- cant role in causing propagation impairments on satellite signals. The severity of impairments depend upon the severity of weather conditions observed i.e. a duststorm will cause attenuation, but a severe duststorm may lead to satellite link unavailability. Rain and Snow attenu- ations are dominant in areas such as America, Europe, etc., whereas sand and dust storms are observed in differ- ent areas around the world. So, the major attenuation contributing factor varies depending upon the regional meteorological conditions. Early researches were focused on the attenuation of the duststorm as a uniform distri- bution or took a specific geometric shape. This approxi- mation gave appropriate results during high or moderate visibility, however it will not provide the designers with respectable results at low visibility. Figure 1 presents a “This work is supported by the Deanship of Scientific Re- search (DSR) at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM) through project No. JF111005.” Fig. 1. Influence of Duststorm at KFUPM, Dhahran, Saudi Ara- bia, in March, 2012. real reflection of the dust and sand storm effects on sig- nal quality of service (QoS). Signal attenuation due to dust and sand storms were really under investigation, in Asia especially in Saudi Arabia, for several decades. Re- searches [1–13] have proposed several models to present this complicated phenomena. Behavior and composition of duststorms seem to be somehow uncorrelated among various regions of the world due to the non-uniformity of the dust characteristics and several other atmospheric factors. The severity becomes increasingly debilitating at the higher ends of the high frequencies [3,5,9]. Consequently, it is extremely hard to optimally manage satellite- dependant resources that are impacted by weather at- tenuations. An effective technical solution to signifi- cantly improve the quality of service (QoS) would de- pend on the ability to properly identify, predict, and qualify the overall impact of individual attenuation fac- tors. A number of models for dust and sand storm atten- uations are available for estimating individual attenua- tion components. However, methodologies that attempt to combine them in a cohesive manner are not widely available [1, 4, 5, 9, 10, 13]. Authors of [10] described a special case of approximated dust distribution of ellipse shape (seen from the top view) of the dust storm, as ex- panded rapidly until the peak and then shrinking grad- ually. Also, an effort has been done by authors of [12] to model the vertical variation of the dust storm based on the idea that the visibility during the dust storm in-