Weather Officials Struggling to Keep Ahead of Changing Spectrum Landscape

The National Weather Service isn’t well-equipped to keep up with the speed with which spectrum decisions are often made, said Michael Farrar, director of National Centers for Environmental Prediction, at an American Meteorological meeting, streamed from Denver Thursday. Farrar warned against the “drip, drip, drip of changes” as spectrum policy evolves.

“The communications industry moves faster than science,” Farrar said. “I’m concerned whether we will … have the time to do rapid tests to demonstrate the objective change in our ability to forecast based on changes to the spectrum interference,” he said: “I’m concerned about resources -- that we may not have enough resources to do these observing system experiments in timelines that are appropriate to influence these [spectrum] decisions.”

Continuing access to data is important to effective weather forecasting, Farrar said. “We’ve seen remarkable improvement in our ability to, for example, predict the track of hurricanes, the intensity of hurricanes,” Farrar said. “Countless lives have been saved, as well as the ability to predict the likelihood of severe weather outbreaks in advance,” he said. Interference isn’t just a problem over land, and can spread over water, he said: “This may be a bigger problem than we knew.”

“We now expect, indeed we demand, weather forecasts to be accurate out to five or six days or even longer, and we think that is the norm,” said Tony McNally, principal scientist at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. To make those kinds of forecasts, “we need to know exactly what the atmosphere is doing right now,” he said.

“We need a global picture of what’s happening now and satellites are the only observing system that can provide that global picture with the accuracy we need,” McNally said. Weather predictions that have saved hundreds of thousands of lives would not be possible without atmospheric readings by satellites, he said.

Jennifer Warren, Lockheed Martin vice president-civil and regulatory affairs, asked how discussions can happen “well before the decision is taken to auction spectrum” in a way that isn’t “competitively sensitive to the wireless industry and yet involves enough of the scientific and weather and climate community to be meaningful."

The NTIA is important, but the FCC is “the final arbiter” on spectrum decisions, Warren said. “The scientific community needs not to rely just on NTIA but work through the FCC as well,” she said. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel brought a culture change to the agency, with a focus on coordination, but she won’t be chair forever, Warren said. The FCC and NTIA are able to hire staff “that actually understand more than communications networks because it’s so much easier to tilt a little bit toward what you understand,” she said.

“We need to get away from looking at this debate as science versus economic growth or national security versus economic growth, or aviation safety versus economic growth,” said Umair Javed, a senior adviser to Rosenworcel. The focus needs to be “how do we craft spectrum policy that achieves our national priorities in the broad sense” and “how do we make sure that the infrastructure for our spectrum policy … decisions enables that type of decision-making,” he said.

“Early engagement is absolutely critical” and in the past federal viewpoints came in through NTIA very late in the process, Javed said. NTIA “is making incredible efforts to fix that -- they’re engaging earlier, they’re talking earlier,” he said.

Too often in the past, there was too little data provided and just arguments against making a reallocation, Javed said: “It was you can’t do this reallocation, you can’t have this auction. … We need to know what are the receiver performance standards, what are the actual capabilities of technology that’s deployed in these bands.”