They're modeling how weather systems form, move, and interact. If they predict a high to be 86deg, and it's really 85, what does that mean as far as accuracy goes? If we use the Kelvin scale, even a 10 degree error makes it seem pretty accurate, though a person's experience in those extremes will be very different.īut I think the biggest problem is that the simple weather forecasts that we use on a daily basis, is a poor representation of what weather forecasters actually do. I often wondered the same thing myself, why don't weather providers provide their own accuracy rates? I started to make a 'simple' system for estimating NOAA accuracy, and immediately ran into trouble determining what accuracy meant. I assume in this case it's specific frequency blocks of mmWave that would be the interference concern, but I honestly don't know enough about the weather sources to be sure of that vs some other change to modulation causing more out of band interference or something like that. T-Mobile for example has said its initial plans for 5G include using its 600 MHz spectrum, with mid-band and mmWave going to certain urban areas.įor whatever reason though most media and even tech people often incorrectly use 5G interchangeably with mmWave, and since 5G itself has plenty of changes it's not always clear what aspects someone is worried about. It should be quite useful therefore for existing spectrum as well, just as WiFi 6 brings improvements to 2.4 GHz utilization. When you say 5G, do you mean actual 5G in general or are you talking about mmWave (FR2, sometimes called 5G high band vs low band)? It's been frustrating having these things get mixed up, because the 5G standard has a lot of improvements aimed at more efficient spectrum utilization, further reduced latency, and other changes across a unified massive range of frequencies compared to previous standards. >Not widely publicized is that 5G cellular is going to eliminate one of the primary data inputs that have made weather prediction successful. The unique geography of the golden gate being a venturi tube between the low pressure 55F/13C pacific ocean marine layer and the high pressure 95F/35c central valley some forty miles inland creates what the local slang describes as 'the wind machine'. My guess is that the lack of HD weather radar in the pacific and the complex topology of the coastal areas and the bay, and also the chaotic interaction between ocean and inland weather systems make for a much more challenging forecasting system than doing forecasting of the plains states. Many times we've gone out sailing expecting calm forecasted weather (Mother's Day 2016) and got 25mph winds and other times we went out expecting forecasted 15mph winds and it was closer to 6-8mph.

Wild storms will be predicted, and then never appear, and other times weather that was going to hit Oregon smashes in to the bay for three days. I think just on Friday there was a prediction that we were going to have a bunch of fog through Tuesday, and it was clear the next day. Usually three days out the weather prediction is accurate to within 30 minutes.Īs for the California SF Bay area, weather prediction is mostly useless, day to day weather prediction is wildly inaccurate. This is really helpful for planning sailing trips, etc. usually the 10 day weather forecast was accurate to within 4 hours.

My experience living in Dallas, Texas, which has some 1500 miles of accurate weather data as systems come across the north american continent from west to east.

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