A study of the joint statistics of rain depolarization and attenuation applied to the prediction of radio link performance

A theoretical formula is derived for the joint statistics of cross‐polarization discrimination (XPD) and rain attenuation for a microwave link. This formula is then applied to the prediction of the distribution of XPD conditional on the copolar rain attenuation and also to the prediction of the distribution of XPD during a rain fade. Application is also made to the estimation of outage time of a dual‐polarization communication system. Theoretical results are compared with experimental data from the eastern USA and southern England, and the agreement has been found to be quite good.