TELKOMNIKA (Telecommunication Computing Electronics and Control)
Vol 24, No 5: October 2026

Rainfall detection on a tropical island using a communication satellite downlink signal and artificial intelligence models

Raden Yudha Mardyansyah (Badan Meteorologi Klimatologi dan Geofisika)
Budhy Kurniawan (Universitas Indonesia)
Santoso Soekirno (Universitas Indonesia)
Danang Eko Nuryanto (Badan Meteorologi Klimatologi dan Geofisika)
Ferry Budhi Susetyo (Universitas Negeri Jakarta)



Article Info

Publish Date
01 Oct 2026

Abstract

The development of rainfall estimates based on satellite links in several high latitude regions shows good results. However, its development for tropical regions is still very less promising, leaving the question of which method is worth using. In this work, we investigate artificial intelligence (AI) models by utilizing the Ku-band satellite downlink signal for rainfall detection on a tropical island. Long-term evaluation of all the models is performed using one year of rainfall intensity data. The findings of this study demonstrate that one-dimensional convolution neural network (1DCNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and random forest (RF) models can effectively identify rainfall occurrences on tropical islands, with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) value of 0.84, 0.84, and 0.83, respectively. These three models consistently provide better accuracy in detecting the region’s diverse rainfall patterns throughout the year. The 1DCNN has better performance compared to the other models, achieving accuracy values of 0.76 and 0.82 during the periods of lowest and highest rainfall, respectively. Considering the presence of numerous potential mislabeled rain samples in the dataset, this result is excellent. In addition, the utilization of higher resolution rainfall intensity data can be a great potential for real-time rainfall monitoring in the tropical region.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

TELKOMNIKA

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT

Description

Submitted papers are evaluated by anonymous referees by single blind peer review for contribution, originality, relevance, and presentation. The Editor shall inform you of the results of the review as soon as possible, hopefully in 10 weeks. Please notice that because of the great number of ...