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In May 2019, Neil Jacobs, the acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), testified before Capitol Hill that 5G wireless signals could decrease forecasting accuracy by 30 percent.
"This would degrade the forecast skill by up to 30%. If you look back in time to see when our forecast skill was roughly 30% less than it was today, it's somewhere around 1980," Jacobs said in May. "This would result in the reduction of hurricane track[ing] forecasts' lead time by roughly two to three days." A delay of two to three days could have a catastrophic effect on human life.
Still, these warnings haven't swayed regulators nor the cell phone industry. In August, Sprint announced more cities would be added to its 5G rollout plan. AT&T already has 5G available to corporate customers in various cities. Verizon already offers 5G to customers and has plans to expand, too.
"Right now the uncertainty is to what extent there will be an interference," he added. "In some sense the cause for education is to make sure that the existing weather sensing bands are protected and that 5G is in areas that are far enough away from where present weather sensors exist."
This does not mean 5G can't exist in states like Florida, but that the power might have to be turned down.
"If the power is turned down, there is a lesser likelihood that water satellites (that will sense the atmosphere) will sense the 5G network" instead, Gerth said.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has been dismissive of these concerns, which are only one of several in regards to 5G. As several experts told Salon last year, the effects of widespread use of mobile 5G need to be better-studied before it goes mainstream.
Why study when you can profit instead?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @10:54PM (2 children)
Much like the OP, your comment is bullshit. Both deserve troll mods.
Stating that forecast errors couldn't have been much worse 30 years ago is demonstrably false. The NHC forecast track errors [noaa.gov] prove this. Forecast errors for lead times of 24 hours were more than twice as large 30 years ago. Like I said in this comment [soylentnews.org], there are continuous improvements to forecast models, and older models that perform poorly are either improved or replaced. The OP included false information and didn't add anything of value to the discussion, hence the troll mod.
Your post might be worse because it's devoid of content related to the topic of hurricane forecasting, instead calling people "libtards" and trying to stir up political arguments. I suppose that's the only thing you have to post about when you don't understand any of the science.
The atmosphere is a chaotic system, so small differences in the initial state cause forecasts to diverge rapidly. Models are imperfect and some atmospheric processes like microphysics can't really be explicitly simulated. Other processes like turbulence in the planetary boundary layer are just too small to simulate with current limitations on computing power. These processes are parameterized, and while these parameterizations have become quite sophisticated, they're far from perfect. All of these issues lead to forecast errors that grow with longer lead times. Forecasters look at a large number of forecast models and ensembles both to make a deterministic prediction and also to estimate the uncertainty of the forecast.
Because the atmosphere is a chaotic system, it's really important to minimize any and all sources of error. Even with powerful supercomputers and modern forecast models that scale quite well, we're still limited in our ability to run very high resolution simulations that will, in principle, produce better forecasts. We also probably don't have a good way of collecting more in-situ upper air observations over the oceans. These sources of error are largely out of our control. However, we can choose not to contaminate our satellite observations due to the use of 5G networks. This source of error is completely avoidable, if we're willing to do so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @02:35AM (1 child)
Oh shut up with your complex theories. Weather has been changing for 100s of years, everybody knows that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 07 2019, @05:03AM
*facepalm*