Wi-Fi threatens weather forecasts

[saikat07]

Wireless technology dangerously clutters the airwaves that meteorologists rely on to monitor thunderstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes, blacking out large swaths of weather radar maps.

Wi-Fi, remote surveillance cameras and other wireless tech emit radio waves that can disrupt those from weather radars. This interference, which creates blind spots on radar images, is a growing problem, meteorologists report October 14 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

“Interference could hide an approaching tornado or a strong convective system and we wouldn’t have any warning,” says coauthor Elena Saltikoff, a meteorologist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki.