THE 鈥渘ot-in-my-back-yard鈥� brigade will take some convincing, but there may be an upside to having cellphone antennas dotted around the landscape: they could give weather forecasters a cheap and accurate measure of rainfall.
Water absorbs microwave energy, so rain interferes with the radio signals sent between cellphone base stations. To maintain the network鈥檚 signal strength, these fluctuations are monitored continually.
Hagit Messer and his team at Tel Aviv University in Israel correlated signal strengths with rainfall measurements taken in the same locations using two conventional techniques: a rain gauge and weather radar. They found that data from the mast was more accurate than the radar, and nearly as good as the expensive rain gauge (Science, vol 12, p 713).
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