The main goal of this research is to study the rain effects on microwave and millimeter wave radio links. Thus, the rain-induced attenuation, depolarization and scattering are studied. To carry out this study, a realistic rain model is proposed, which consider a realistic rain medium composed by a cluster of raindrops with the shape-size relation proposed by Chuang and Beard, a raindrop size distribution given by de Wolf, index of refraction of water for a given temperature and frequency suggested by Ray and a distribution of the orientation angle of the symmetry axis. The realistic rain model is evaluated with two different applications of systems operating at microwave and millimeter wave frequencies. One of the applications involves wireless telecommunication systems, which are strongly affected by the presence of precipitation. To design an efficient radio communication system, the realistic rain model is applied for the analysis and quantification of rain-induced effects on links operating at millimeterwave frequencies in urban environments. Another application involves weather radars (X-band radars in particular). Considering their relatively low cost and high resolution, X-band radars would be among the best options to monitor meteorological events. However, they are susceptible to attenuation by fog, snow or rain. To solve this problem, a realistic and improved rain model is implemented to compute backscattering cross sections and estimate rain attenuation at each range gate. The proposed method is evaluated using radar data provided by the CASA OTG X-band (lambda equal a 3cm) radar located in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, and X-band radar METEOR 50DX –Selex located in Belém, Brazil.