Correction to Article from Last Week's RF Report

In last week's RF Report a piece was published about cell phone base station signals being used to measure rainfall patterns in Israel. Reader Gordon Pugh flagged a typo in that article. It said "...the system works by measuring the strength of the signal from the satellite." It should have read "...the system works by measuring the strength of signals at the cell phone base station."

However, RF propagation of satellite signals can be used for meteorological measurements. There is a totally different project underway to use satellites to measure atmospheric temperature, pressure and humidity. The COSMIC constellation of six satellites launched April 14 will use radio occultation to measure Earth's atmosphere. Details on the COSMIC (short for Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate) project can be found in the April IEEE Spectrum article and online.