Competition over the bandwidths used by mobile phones and time-critical weather transmissions is only part of the story (see Nature 535, 208–209; 2016). In fact, mobile networks are themselves becoming an important tool for monitoring the weather.
Because weather conditions reduce the strength of radio signals transmitted by commercial microwave links in cellular networks, they can act as a virtual environmental-monitoring facility. For instance, commercial cellular data are already being used to track precipitation, fog, near-surface moisture (see, for example, N. David et al. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 96, 1687–1698; 2015) and dew (O. Harel et al. IEEE Sel. Top. Appl. Earth Obs. Remote Sens. 8, 4396–4404; 2015), and to predict floods (a discovery awarded the World Intellectual Property Organization Medal in 2009).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Alpert, P., Messer, H. & David, N. Mobile networks aid weather monitoring. Nature 537, 617 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/537617e
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/537617e
This article is cited by
-
Rainfall Monitoring Using a Microwave Links Network: A Long-Term Experiment in East China
Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (2023)
-
Harnessing Crowdsourced Data and Prevalent Technologies for Atmospheric Research
Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (2019)