A study on the Impact of Non-Uniform 5G Leakage on the Accuracy of Weather Forecasts

In the meteorological satellites, the atmospheric sounding sensors such as Advanced Microwave Sounding Units (AMSU) and Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) are used to observe water vapor in the atmosphere. The 23.8 GHz band, in which the sensing is performed, is adjacent to the 3GPP band n258 band (ranging from above 24 GHz to above 27 GHz) that is allocated for the emerging technology of 5G mmWave. There are concerns that the adjacency of these two bands would lead to leakage of energy from 5G mmWave bands into the 23.8 GHz band, and result in a systematic noise in water vapor observations, and consequently erroneous weather predictions. To understand the impact of the leakage on the weather forecasting, we predicted the long-term spatio-temporal distribution of 5G mmWave transmitter base stations in the county level throughout the United States for the years of 2025, 2030 and 2040, and accordingly the potential 5G leakage in terms of noise in brightness temperature, which is the representative parameter of atmospheric radiance. The input of data assimilation schemes in numerical weather prediction models were then generated based on the affected brightness temperature with the non-uniform 5G leakage from the different counties to assess the impact of 5G leakage. The simulated precipitation and temperature forecasting using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model for 12-hr prediction was conducted for the Super Tuesday Tornado Outbreak data set. The preliminary results show that in 2040 where the development of 5G mmWave network would get saturated the maximum noise in brightness temperature would reach more than 3 Kelvins in highly dense metropolitan areas. The distribution of the forecasting error will be presented and discussed in the conference.