I've been reading up a lot on barometric pressure and weather forecasting for when my barometric sensors arrive in the mail in a few weeks.
The verdict isn’t in but the stakes are high – very high – for weather forecasting in the U.S. and for many nations who rely on our satellite imagery and data. The deployment of 5G technology has the potential to produce serious interference with the transmission of satellite data. An article in the Washington Post by Jason Samenow of the Capital Weather Gang details some of the technical issues I’ve been seeing in the literature for quite some time. As most of you know, the wireless industry and the FCC are racing to deploy 5G technology.
Besides 5G’s advances in communications capacity, there are very big bucks on the line. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been warning about possible major negative impacts on its mission to provide accurate forecasts that protect lives and property. NOAA’s warnings have not been warmly received by the FCC or the wireless industry. Complexities abound.
Make no mistake: 5G technology is a national priority and could deliver information as much as 100 times faster than current microwave technology. There are obviously good reasons for the FCC to essentially partner with the wireless industry to get this 5G show on the road. But NOAA has abundant evidence this technology could set us back decades by interfering with the transmission of a broad spectrum of satellite transmission bandwidth. Some of the most critical data for all computer models and for near term detection of dangerous and severe storms is in this bandwidth. The low orbiting polar satellites, with their ever-shifting orbital paths, provide higher resolution detail as they circle the globe.
he 12 months ending in April 2019 were the wettest year-long period in U.S. records going back to 1895, according to the monthly U.S. climate summary issued Wednesday by the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Averaged across the contiguous U.S., the total of 36.20” made the period from May 2018 to April 2019 the first year-long span ever to top 36”. The old record for any 12-month period was 35.78”, from April 2015 to March 2016.
"We often hear the individuals who get on TV that say, 'Things hit without warning' or that they didn't believe this would happen to them," she says. "As a social scientist, I say there's a lot in these stories. We need to get out there and do a better job of understanding their perspective."
"A weather app is a nifty tool that predicts your meteorological future, calculated with the strength of radar, algorithms and satellites around the world. Today, computerized weather prediction—like moving pictures or flying by plane—is so commonplace that smartphone-users don’t give it a second thought. But at mid-century, the idea that you might be able to forecast the weather days or even weeks ahead was a tantalizing prospect."
"One of the most important breakthroughs in weather forecasting took place in the spring of 1950, during an experiment at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. For over a month straight, a team of scientists and computer operators worked tirelessly to do something meteorologists had been working toward for nearly a century: predict the weather mathematically."