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New Technology Uses Cellular Towers For Super-Accurate Weather Measurements
Iddo Genuth (903542) writes "Israeli scientists from the Tel Aviv University perfected a method for using cell phone service towers' microwave emitters to measure rain and snow and even (for the first time ) detect fog with great accuracy over vast areas in real time. The research team members have analyzed endless amounts of raw cellular data and developed more accurate ways to measure meteorological information and added more parameters that they can now measure using their growing database. When combined with existing meteorological monitoring technologies such as radars and local ground based weather stations, the results show unprecedented level of accuracy that can give better and further weather forecast as well as special warnings about upcoming floods, fog and hail which can affect both people and crop production."
Too bad the post office isn't as efficient as the weather service.
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In a related story, the NSA has received generous funding to start producing detailed weather forecasts.
What about UV index or temperature or humidity? I meant if they arent measured on the same spot as everything else then the usefulness of those will suffer
The only differences being that with cell towers, the receivers and transmitters are controlled by two independent parties and the signal itself was not intended for that particular purpose.
You know exactly where the tower is, you can easily reconstruct the RF signal as-transmitted by receiving the bitstream yourself and calculating the original signal as-sent. All that is left to do is compute the correlation between measured signals across your receiver network and weather along the receiver-transmitter path and their immediate surroundings.
This is a bit like a radar version of passive sonar.
Let see WWII era non guided rockets vs US supplied Laser guided missiles Some kind of dire conflict my ass
Turns out that it's easy to measure the weather with a cell phone tower.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
The military application is that it is rumoured to be able to detect stealth aircraft.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The military application is that it is rumoured to be able to detect stealth aircraft.
No rumor that. Dunno about cell towers, but it was shown pretty conclusively in the '90s that the "hole in the sky" caused when a stealth aircraft blocks FM radio signals can be seen. Depends of course on having a good FM sensor and a solid transmitter or two in the area.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Fedex depends on USPS for last mile delivery in a lot of places. USPS handles orders of magnitude more deliveries than Fedex.
Based on that, they are much MORE efficient than Fedex.
Awwww, did I make someone feel like a braying ass?
Who's a braying ass? YOU're a braying ass, yes you ARE!
Learn to speak like a grownup and I'll stop with the baby talk.
Mositure and temprature variations causes bending of GPS wavepaths and small delays. Geophysicists ave been studying the "noise" in large scale GPS data to measure atmospheric conditions. Right now this mostly from dedicated high frequency tectonics GPS stations like Earthscope. There could be a way to "crowdsource" smartphone users for more data.
I do a reference to Back to the Future III, and you guys go on to debate about the USPS.
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I wonder if they could extend and improve their "iron dome" with this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Would be great if they could knock all the Palestinian missiles out of the air instead of bombing the sh*t out of the lauch sites (which the launchers tend to put in urban areas).