Measuring Weather Effects and Link Quality Dynamics in LEO Satellite Networks

2026-03-14

AI Summary

This study investigates the dynamic impact of meteorological factors on the quality of low Earth orbit satellite communication links. Through 56 days of in-situ observations, high-precision weather data—including ceilometer measurements, microwave radiometer readings, and sky image analyses powered by vision-language models—were synchronously collected alongside high-frequency network performance metrics. For the first time, the study quantifies the influence of atmospheric liquid water path (LWP) on Starlink links, revealing that elevated LWP significantly degrades download throughput—by up to 60 Mbit/s—particularly during rainfall, while upload rates and latency remain largely unaffected. Crucially, cloud cover alone is shown not to be a primary factor; rather, the liquid water content in the atmosphere drives performance degradation. The dataset also captures a measurable improvement in overall link performance following the deployment of new satellite hardware, underscoring the positive role of infrastructure evolution in enhancing link robustness.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Plan Execution and Monitoring
• Natural Language Processing: Interpretability, Analysis, and Evaluation of NLP Models

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study of dynamic factors affecting link quality in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications, using Starlink as a case study. Over 56 days, 112 high-quality meteorological measurements in mostly 1-min intervals, co-located with a user terminal, were collected, alongside frequent network performance data. Cloud characteristics were estimated using professional weather instruments such as a ceilometer, microwave radiometer, and vision-language model on sky images. Our results show that general cloud presence does not significantly impact throughput or latency. The impact of cloud coverage rather depends on the presence of liquid water in the atmosphere, quantified by liquid water path (LWP), which correlates with notable download throughput reductions (up to 60 MBit/s), especially during rain. Upload and latency were largely unaffected. Analysis of the evolving satellite network revealed that newer satellite hardware and infrastructural upgrades also contributed to performance increases during the experiment period. These findings highlight atmospheric liquid water as the key weather-related factor affecting link quality and underscore the influence of network changes over time.

Problem

• LEO satellite networks
• link quality
• weather effects
• liquid water path
• atmospheric conditions

Innovation

• LEO satellite networks
• liquid water path
• link quality dynamics
• weather impact
• Starlink