First sentence: not what was said. But note that microwave towers have been in use for mission-critical long-range all-weather point-to-point communication on earth for many, many decades. My late father helped design some of them.

What would the minimum power loss be for thick cloud/hurricane? Dunno.

Those microwave towers are transmitting some number of milliwatts of power though, with super high gain antennas.

Not kilowatts.

As synonymous comms and power delivery may look, they are a different ball game.

This also seems to be the last nail in the coffin for terrestrial radio astronomy, now that you mention it.

> so there's a microwave frequency that is completely unaffected by atmospherics? In which water, ozone, the rest of the gas mixure and particulates are mostly transparent?

Nope. The transparent bands are in the visible spectrum and far infrared(8-14um). Microwaves are mostly uniformly absorbed by water molecules:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_window