Mapping the Storm: Geospatial Impacts of Severe Weather on LEO Network Performance

2026-06-01

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of large-scale, high spatiotemporal resolution empirical analysis on how localized severe weather events impact low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite network performance. Leveraging 870,000 terminal-hours of Starlink telemetry data aligned at minute-level granularity with high-resolution meteorological observations, the work quantifies—across continental scales—the effects of thunderstorms and heavy precipitation on latency, packet loss, and signal quality. Results reveal that over 55% of terminals experience significant performance degradation during severe weather, with some outages persisting from several minutes to multiple hours. The study further proposes a weather-aware network planning and service forecasting framework, offering critical empirical insights for designing resilient LEO satellite communication systems.

Abstract

LEO satellite constellations, led by deployments such as Starlink, are playing an increasingly pivotal role in enabling global broadband connectivity. However, the reliability and performance of these space-based networks are highly sensitive to environmental dynamics, particularly localized weather phenomena that exhibit strong spatio-temporal variability. In this study, we present a continental-scale geospatial analysis of weather-induced performance degradation in the Starlink LEO network, with a focus on the contiguous United States. Leveraging a unique dataset comprising more than 870,000 terminal hours of minute-level telemetry from 1,292 Starlink terminals, we integrate high-resolution localized weather observations to quantify the impact of various meteorological conditions. We evaluated key performance indicators (KPIs)-including ping latency, ping drop rate, and signal quality-using spatial join techniques and time-aligned correlation with classified weather events. Our analysis reveals that severe weather events, such as thunderstorms with heavy rain or snow, have a pronounced effect on network performance. In particular, more than 55% affected terminals experienced substantial degradation. Temporal continuity analysis at the minute level shows that such degradation can lead to sustained impairments or full service outages lasting from several minutes to multiple hours.This work contributes to the first large-scale empirical study linking LEO satellite Internet performance with fine-grained weather data in both space and time. Our findings offer actionable insights for geospatial predictive modeling, weather-aware network provisioning, and resilient satellite communication system design. We also propose a framework for incorporating weather-inferred performance variability into future geospatial planning and service-level forecasting tools for LEO-based Internet systems.

Problem

• LEO satellite networks
• severe weather
• network performance degradation
• geospatial analysis
• weather impact

Innovation

• LEO satellite networks
• weather-induced performance degradation
• geospatial analysis
• fine-grained telemetry
• weather-aware networking