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Global 5G deal poses significant threat to weather forecast accuracy, experts warn
A long-awaited international deal governing how the world's technology companies should roll out 5G technology poses serious risks to weather forecast accuracy, according to data from federal agencies and the World Meteorological Organization.
Negotiators from around the world announced a deal Friday at a meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for how to roll out 5G technology that operates using specific radio frequency bands.
Studies completed before the negotiations by U.S. government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the Navy had warned that 5G equipment operating in the 24-gigahertz frequency band could interfere with transmissions from polar-orbiting satellites used to gather weather data. This could make forecasts much less reliable, the reports found.
Specifically, these highly technical analyses concluded that if deployed widely and without adequate constraints, telecommunications equipment operating in the 24 GHz frequency band would bleed into the frequencies that NOAA and NASA satellite sensors also use to sense the presence and properties of water vapor in the atmosphere, significantly interfering with the collection and transmission of critical weather data.
The NOAA report, for example, warned of a potential loss of 77.4 percent of data coming from microwave sounders mounted on the agency's polar-orbiting satellites.
The agency's microwave sounders operate at a frequency of 23.6 to 24 GHz, which is close to the frequency that the Federal Communications Commission auctioned off the use of for about $2 billion beginning this past March.
The key concerns about 5G interference focus on what are known as baseline interference limits, often referred to as out-of-band emission limits.
Previously:
Hurricane Tracking Technology is About to Regress 30 Years
Ajit Pai Says NOAA and NASA Are Wrong About 5G Harming Weather Forecasts
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @01:22AM
> Or fund any sat mods the make sense.
While I'm no weather sat expert, it seems pretty clear that the weather frequencies were chosen based on physics--so changing the satellite to a different frequency doesn't make any sense at all.