The National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) has established its ground station named Antarctica Ground Station for Earth Observation Satellites (AGEOS) at Bharati station located at Larsemann hills area of Antarctica for the tracking and data acquisition from polar orbiting satellites. A communication link through a geostationary satellite in C-band is being used for transferring data to the mainland. There is a need to enhance the data rate in the near future considering the huge volume of data being acquired at AGEOS. A satellite link operating at Ka-band is proposed for accommodating the bandwidth requirements. It is necessary to estimate the worst case atmospheric attenuation at Ka-band over Larsemann hills area for calculating the link margins required. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has setup a wide range of meteorological instruments at Bharati station and the local data collected for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 are used in this study. The link is assumed to operate at a frequency of 20 GHz with linear polarization. An exceedance probability of 0.1% is used to arrive at the annual statistics of the attenuation. Recommendations by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are followed and the estimation is carried out using MATLAB. An estimated total atmospheric attenuation of 2.28 dB is obtained. The results are used further for carrying out link budgeting for a Ka-band satellite communication link between Bharati station and India.

中文翻译：

---

南极洲拉瑟曼丘陵地区 Ka 频段地空无线电链路的大气衰减估计

国家遥感中心（NRSC）在位于南极洲拉瑟曼丘陵地区的巴拉蒂站建立了名为南极对地观测卫星地面站（AGEOS）的地面站，用于极地轨道卫星的跟踪和数据采集。通过 C 波段对地静止卫星的通信链路正在用于向大陆传输数据。考虑到 AGEOS 采集的数据量巨大，在不久的将来需要提高数据速率。建议采用在 Ka 频段运行的卫星链路来满足带宽要求。有必要估计拉瑟曼丘陵地区 Ka 波段最坏情况的大气衰减，以计算所需的链路余量。印度气象部门 (IMD) 在巴拉蒂站安装了各种气象仪器，本研究使用了 2020 年、2021 年和 2022 年收集的当地数据。假设该链路以 20 GHz 频率运行，采用线性极化。使用 0.1% 的超出概率来得出衰减的年度统计数据。遵循国际电信联盟 (ITU) 的建议并使用 MATLAB 进行估计。估计总大气衰减为 2.28 dB。结果进一步用于为巴拉蒂站和印度之间的 Ka 波段卫星通信链路进行链路预算。