article · Discover Geoscience
Atmospheric conditions significantly affect radio wave propagation, contributing to link blackouts, reduced signal strength, and irregular communication ranges. An analysis of meteorological data spanning 1981 to 2022 examines how temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, and rainfall influence radio refractivity across different eco-climatic zones in Nigeria. Long-term assessments show rising variability in temperature and humidity, accompanied by a steady increase in radio refractivity, particularly within humid locations such as Yenagoa and Ibadan. Positive refractivity deviations occurred predominantly during wet and cessation periods across southern coastal zones. Conversely, weaker or negative trends appeared during dry and onset seasons in northern Sahel and Sudan savannah locations. Humidity exhibited the strongest influence on refractivity in northern zones, whereas temperature played a more dominant role in freshwater and mangrove areas. These regional insights offer practical meteorological baselines for network design in tropical regions.
Weather fluctuations directly interfere with wireless communications, causing dropped signals and unreliable network coverage. Understanding how temperature and humidity dictate radio refractivity across distinct climatic regions allows engineers to anticipate environmental signal loss. This information helps communications providers design more resilient wireless networks that can adapt to seasonal and local weather shifts across tropical areas.
The findings can inform telecommunications operators and network infrastructure planners seeking to optimise wireless link budgets and mitigate signal degradation. The work sits at an applied research stage, providing multi-decade empirical evidence and sensitivity models that engineering teams can integrate into local network planning tools and propagation models in Nigeria and comparable tropical zones.
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The propagation of radio waves/signals is strongly influenced by atmospheric parameters, leading to signal degradation, unpredictable communication ranges, and link blackouts; however, this understanding has not been fully explored across diverse eco-climatic zones. Using meteorological data from selected locations across Nigeria’s eco-climatic zones from 1981 to 2022, this study assesses the impact of temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, and precipitation on radio refractivity at annual and seasonal timescales (dry, onset, wet, and cessation periods). For the annual trend analysis, the Mann-Kendall trend test showed a noticeable increase in variability in both temperature and relative humidity. These trends were further supported by innovative trend analysis, which revealed a steady increase in refractivity, especially in humid climates like Yenagoa and Ibadan. For the analysis across seasons, positive refractivity deviations were largest and most consistent in both the wet and cessation periods, which mainly occurred over the humid and coastal areas (0.13 to 0.15 N-units/year), but weaker or negative trends were observed in the dry and onset periods in the Sahel and Sudan savannah (northern) locations (-0.236 to 0.224 N-units/year). Correlation analysis revealed strong relationships between refractivity and humidity, especially at Sahel and Sudan savannah sites ( r > 0.90). The multilinear regression-based sensitivity framework indicated that relative humidity exerted a greater influence on the refractivity in these climates than in the Mangrove and Freshwater zones; the reverse was identified for temperature. These findings have significant implications for Nigeria’s telecommunications industry and other tropical regions with comparable climatic characteristics, particularly for optimizing network planning and mitigating signal degradation caused by weather fluctuations.
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DOI: 10.1007/s44288-026-00708-x
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