Opportunistic Weather Sensing with Phased Array Base Stations

Opportunistic sensing of precipitation through existing wireless communications infrastructure such as satellite ground terminals, commercial microwave links, and mobile communications base-stations has gained significant interest in recent years. These systems complement weather radar observations while offering the advantage of a relatively dense deployment at a lower cost. Prior works largely employ single-antenna communications receiver for meteorological observations. In this work, we explore the possibility of re-purposing S-band fifth-generation (5G) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications base-stations to estimate low-elevation precipitation in urban areas in an opportunistic fashion. Without any additional hardware, specialized waveform design (other than general-purpose 5G communications signals), and overhead on time-frequency resources, our objective is to achieve simultaneous weather sensing and 5G communications operation. To this end, we build a precipitation sensing simulator based on massive MIMO base-station hardware and signals. The simulator is based on the Argos V3 platform located at the Rice University football stadium with 42 dual-polarized radio heads operating at the Citizens Broadband Radio Service band.