Impact of Weather on Satellite Communication: Evaluating Starlink Resilience

TL;DR

This study assesses how weather conditions—specifically rain and cloud cover—affect Starlink’s Flat High Performance (FHP) terminal in a high-latitude setting. Using a vehicle-mounted FHP terminal in Oulu, Finland, the authors collect bidirectional throughput and RTT data with iPerf3, Ping, and Traceroute across multiple servers, under varied meteorological conditions. Key findings show substantial reductions in both uplink (~52%) and downlink (~38%) throughput during rain, while RTT remains largely stable; cloud cover further reduces throughput in a negative linear relationship. The results demonstrate Starlink’s resilience in terms of connectivity availability (>98.5%) even under rain and clouds, offering practical guidance for deploying Starlink in Nordic regions and highlighting the need for longer-term measurements under extreme weather.

Abstract

Satellite communications have emerged as one of the most feasible solutions to provide global wireless coverage and connect the unconnected. Starlink dominates the market with over 7,000 operational satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and offers global high-speed and low-latency Internet service for stationary and mobile use cases, including in-motion connectivity for vehicles, vessels, and aircraft. Starlink terminals are designed to handle extreme weather conditions. Starlink recommends a flat high performance (FHP) terminal for users living in areas with extreme weather conditions. The earlier studies evaluated Starlink's FHP throughput for stationary and in-motion users without providing a detailed analysis of how weather affects its performance. There remains a need to investigate the impact of weather on FHP's throughput. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by analyzing the impact of weather on Starlink's performance in Oulu, Finland, a city located in Northern Europe near the Arctic Circle. Our measurements reveal that rain degrades median uplink and downlink throughput by 52.27% and 37.84%, respectively. On the contrary, there was no noticeable impact on the round-trip time. Additionally, we also examine the impact of cloud cover on the Starlink throughput. The linear regression analysis reveals the negative relationship between throughput and cloud cover. The cloud cover of up to 12.5% has around 20% greater throughput than the cloud cover of 87.5%

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: Total annual precipitation (rain and snow) calculated as the sum of daily averages in 2024. Image credit: [OurWorldinData].
• Figure 2: Experimental setup illustration, where flat high performance terminal is installed on the rooftop of a Ford Ranger vehicle.
• Figure 3: Location of the measurement (client) and the weather stations.
• Figure 4: Comparison of rain intensity and relative humidity for June 18 and June 27. The upper plot (green) shows that on June 27, there was no rain, the sky was clear without cloud cover, and relative humidity was almost half. The lower plot (red) of the figure shows statistics for June 18; there was rain, causing high relative humidity. The sampling rate of weather statistics is 60 seconds.
• Figure 5: Throughput comparison of a clear and rainy day from an iPerf3 client in Oulu to an iPerf3 server in Helsinki. Each sub-figure contains 300 samples corresponding to a 5-minute measurement period. In total, this figure comprises 1,200 samples.