Rain Drops Signal Cell Phones

An anonymous reader writes "Signals from mobile phone masts have been used to measure rainfall patterns in Israel, scientists report. From the BBC article: 'The University of Tel-Aviv analyzed information routinely collected by mobile networks and say their technique is more accurate than current methods used by meteorological services. The data is a by-product of mobile network operators' need to monitor signal strength. If bad weather causes a signal to drop, an automatic system analyzing the data boosts the signal to make sure that people can still use their mobile phones. The amount of reduction in signal strength gave the researchers an indication of how much rain had fallen.'"

Comments

Can't grok headline

[What'sInAName]

Maybe it's just me (I'm up at 5:30am to catch a flight) but I'm having trouble parsing the headline. Sounds like the rain is signaling cell phones.

Kind of interesting, but (having not read TFA, mind you) I wonder how small amounts of rain affect the signal. One would thing the signal would only be affected by heavy rain, and so the resolution of the resulting data would suffer.

Did you know

[Hemi Rodner]

that the cellular coverage rate in Israel is bigger than 100% because many people own more than one cellular?

How did they substantiate the claim

[mapkinase]

that this method is "more accurate" than gauging and especially radar? I did not find it in BBC article and I do not have access to full text in Science, but the abstract says:

The global spread of wireless networks brings a great opportunity for their use in environmental studies. Weather, atmospheric conditions, and constituents cause propagation impairments on radio links. As such, while providing communication facilities, existing wireless communication systems can be used as a widely distributed, high-resolution atmospheric observation network, operating in real time with minimum supervision and without additional cost. Here we demonstrate how measurements of the received signal level, which are made in a cellular network, provide reliable measurements for surface rainfall. We compare the estimated rainfall intensity with radar and rain gauge measurements.

No claims about accuracy as you see. Whoever have access to full text please provide some clue (by Monday when I will have the access, the topic will be gone, so please post now).

Re:Detect rain... and anything else that blocks si

[RubberDogBone]

Would you like a prize? Have one. Indeed, cell signals have been used to track objects, like aircraft.

In particular, a US F-117 Stealth fighter was shot down over Bosnia. The shooters could not track the plane on radar -because it's stealth, you know- so they looked instead at the changing signal patterns of the cell system as the plane flew over.

They didn't look for the plane so much as the "signal hole" it made as it moved through the sky. They simply aimed some missles at the "hole" and scored a hit. It was the first F117 downed by enemy fire.

Very creative. Everydamnbody in the world who's likely to be F117 targets took lots and lots of notes.