On Atmospheric Absorption Values at Millimeter Waves on the Suffa Plateau and Karadag Landfill

We present the results of a comparative analysis of the available atmospheric absorption data for millimeter waves on the Suffa plateau (southern Uzbekistan). It is shown that the atmospheric absorption values at wavelengths of 3 and 2 mm published in G. Bubnov, et al., EPJ Web of Conferences 195, 09002 (2018) are much smaller than the data obtained for the Suffa site according to other sources. The optical depth we calculated on the basis of the global model of the atmosphere from the NASA website also shows that the data of the above work are underestimated by a factor of two. As a result, the actual astroclimate conditions of the Suffa plateau are, in particular, much worse than the Terskol peak in Russia and Koluch-Kul site in Tajikistan. Also, in the same work, we have found an overestimation of atmospheric absorption values by about 1.5 times at a wavelength of 2 mm for another site (Karadag landfill) compared with the values we obtained during independent processing of the same data. Therefore, the data given in the above article for the Suffa plateau cannot be considered reliable, and they should not be used when choosing sites for millimeter-wave antennas.