 Thank you all for coming. My name is Victoria Sands, and I'm a law enforcement director for the Secure World Foundation. The Secure World Foundation is a private operating foundation that focuses on sustainable use of space. We look at how it basically is spaced with better life on this earth. And so our interest in this topic is whether or not the access to space will be interrupted if the spectrum is off the ground. So we'd be very curious to hear our very good, very expert panel of opinions on these issues. And with that, just because of timing, we're going to go on to our speakers. You should have the bios in front of you. I would like to add this event, just be recorded. And this is on record, so FYI, do yourself more. Well, we're basically just going to go down the line, have all of our speakers get their initial remarks, then there'll be time to continue and I'll do it. Thanks a lot. First of all, Cameron, please. Thank you, Victoria. Thank you for hosting us at the AMS representative who's co-sponsoring this event. I'm very able to be here with you today. The data from satellite measurements make a very significant contribution to many broader products that are used by government, companies, and individuals. These weather products include not only general forecasts, but more immediate and urgent watches, warnings, and advisories. Whether we are talking about numerical weather prediction model outlets, space weather events, weather information for emergency managers, the relay of hydro-linear logical data from geographically remote land, sea or stream sensors, or images seen on the evening television weather broadcast or on internet websites, all utilize the radius spectrum to bring operational science data from space to the earth. Many federal, state, local, and tribal and private sector users depend upon the direct broadcast of data from geostationary weather satellites. However, we don't know exactly how many direct broadcast users exist, because receive only satellite ground stations may be purchased by anyone without a license, and generally, from most users without the protection from radio frequency interference that a license generally suggests. Uses for this broadcast may include, for example, a primary method of severe weather warning, especially after the ground power or communications infrastructure has been impacted by a weather event. Or the redundant communications path needed to create time-sensitive operational federal or private sector products. As an example of users of a direct broadcast, Alaska and Hawaii need satellite data due to the shortage of surface weather stations. The data collection system users receive data in this band for hydro-logic forecasting and flood warning. Space weather data from geosts is received exclusively in this spectrum. These are three of many examples. Many people are using products that were created by using the direct broadcast in either a primary or a backup mode. And this group of users are very likely unaware that these products depend upon being able to receive the satellite data. We will hear about these and other examples of products that many people across the country use every day, as well as other affected products that at some time someone may need to receive warnings of imminent danger. Why is the spectrum and thus the ability to receive data in these wavelengths in danger of interference in the first place? Quite simply, the commercial use of smartphones and tablets have skyrocketed. Movie downloads and streaming of large amounts of data have become ubiquitous in today's world. To meet the demands for ever more spectrum-intense uses, such faster and greater streaming of data or simply more wireless features, the commercial broadband industry requires more and more segments of the radio spectrum. Spectrum is a finite resource, and most of that spectrum is already occupied by multiple users. From November 13th of last year to January 30th, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission conducted a spectrum auction to share two bands nationally with commercial broadband wireless users. To understand some of the market forces at work, we note that a small orphaned segment of spectrum currently used for downloading the post-satellite data and direct broadcast of such properties as FY3, Met-Up, and Surall brought over $2.4 billion. While a more desirable pair of DOD spectrum fielded over $42 billion during the same event. It is too late to impact that auction, but we mention it here so that the community is aware of the apparent market value of the spectrum. The sale of the spectrum thus provided an immediate and large source of revenue to the government, and so future spectrum sales are ever more likely. Demand is such that more bands are under consideration for a future auction. These new candidate bands include the GOES, GOESR broadcast downlink band, used to send all level 1B imagery and level 2 data, relay of data collection systems from porous real sensors, space weather downlifts from GOES and GOESR, the low-rate information transfer and the emergency managers weather information network said can win when high-rate information transfer are all in this spectrum. To make that band viable for sharing with commercial users, the NWS radio sobs would have to be moved to a new band. Another band under consideration for sharing are the Nexrad radar spectrum. These future band candidates are likely to be selected by May or June of this year, after which a short public comment opportunity would occur prior to the final band selection for the subsequent future auction. We as a community need to raise awareness of the impacts of these actions and explore how we can best mitigate, live with or adapt to these changes. If meteorological users believe this change to the weather infrastructure could affect them in any way, participating in those public comment opportunities are essential. Inputs from a few hundred users will likely make little difference. But significant comments from a multitude of users in different segments will be heard. Our goal today is to raise the awareness of the user community on what selling of the spectrum may mean to them, to industry, and to the general public. It is our hope that by doing so, we might be able to work together to find out how to best move forward for both our community and the larger population. The panelists today will provide some context and understanding of the scope of the issues. We are very pleased to have them with us with today, so please give them their attention. First up, David Luvar. Thank you, Caroline and Victoria. My name is David Luvar, and I'm the radio spectrum management specialist from the Aerospace Corporation. I support GOESR Weather Satellite Development Program and its excellent spectrum issues. I should add, though, that the view is expressed in this presentation on my own, and I'm not speaking for NOAA as the Department of Commerce on Radio Frequency Madness. Slide one that you see, we'll give you a little background. Since the early 1970s, NOAA Weather Satellites have featured a direct broadcast capability that was available to anyone who had a ground receiving station. Those capabilities have created an evolved architecture where federally licensed satellites broadcast to a wide variety of federal ground receiving systems in the L-band radio spectrum, specifically from 1675 to 1695 megahertz. The GOESR broadcast architecture is a busy slide, which I'm not going to brief. I just want to simply note the industry sectors of non-federal users, which are listed in the bottom in the orange color, which receive satellite data. And to the right, the data collection system and the emergency managers weather information network users. End users benefit from data sent to federal facilities. Non-federal end users directly and the private weather enterprise. So let's just talk a little bit about it. Services on the geostationary operational environmental satellite or GOES include the following. Number one, a broadcast downlink, a full resolution, calibrated, near real-time data and images from each instrument on the spacecraft observatory to federal and non-federal users known as GVAR today and GRV on the new satellite series. Second, a data relay system known as DCS which carries about 750,000 messages per day of river, stream and tidal gauge data and other types of environmental sensors to federal, state, local and tribal and private users. Number three, a highly reliable broadcast of near real-time products in the national weather service into a one meter size ground receiving antenna for low cost equipment which may be battery powered called the emergency managers weather information network or MWM. MWM is intended for use by first responders and state, local and private emergency managers. And lastly, number four, a broadcast of reduced subset of GOES imagery and other meteorological data for federal, state and local and private use known as low-rate information transfer or L-RIT today and which will be known as high-rate information transfer on the GOES-R satellites. So what's shown in green on this slide are the federal services that I just mentioned and ensure you see where they are on the spectrum. Now perhaps this radio spectrum data is a bit tedious for our audience, however it will help set the stage for the balance of this panel discussion. I'd like to point out a favorite phrase that I use if one considers the term millibars and the term megahertz. They're both three syllables in the link. If you give me the letter M, otherwise they really don't have very much to do with each other. So many end users will not necessarily know that the data which is used to create selected meteorological and hydrological products passes through this radio spectrum. And end users may not know physically where such data is received directly from the satellite by nurse station. Yet knowing both of these facts are important if stronger terrestrial commercial signals begin to create radio frequency interference to reception of those direct broadcast meteorological data. So contract this meteorological use as Caroline said in the intro with the growing demand for broadband wireless radio spectrum enabling smart phones and tablets. I'm fairly confident that everybody in this room has one or more wireless devices and that many people watching this delayed video broadcast on the internet will be viewing it on a smart phone, the tablet, or internet connected wireless device. As consumers move towards services that require additional bandwidth, it is clear that more spectrum will be required to serve that usage. So because of this demand, the administration tasked the federal spectrum regulator in 2010 to identify 500 megahertz of federal radio spectrum, which could be shared or repurposed for use by the commercial broadband wireless industry within the stated timeframe. Ideally the spectrum that is currently used primarily for federal agencies would be newly made available for non-federal applications if and when viable alternatives can be found for the federal services. So bear with me for a bit of spectrum specifics before we address how users benefit from the data shown in the spectrum. So today, the slide shows that they end used by the current Go satellite succeeded above the line in this page. In the 2016 to 2030 timeframe, or actually beyond that in the 2030 timeframe, for which you'll see is the Go's R application, a new generation of weather satellites that launches in one year from now. And while we have both sets of satellites in operation, you're going to see both of those services in that band. Now, notice the red panels on this slide indicate current commercial use. This particular piece of spectrum directly below the Go's R spacecraft is being leased today by LightSquared LLC for tower to smartphone broadband communications. And the band right next to it is under a legislative proposal in the president's fiscal 15 budget to make that five megahertz also available for broadband use. Now, as I said, you see below it in yellow the radio sands for the national order service. The plan is that, and the plan presumes that those radio sands will be moved elsewhere in the spectrum, but this band still overlaps the hydrological and other data related to space due to the DCS system that we talked about. And as was mentioned in the intro, this is the band that was just sold at auction, okay? So the federal communications recently completed this auction and the 15 megahertz of current generation polar weather satellite data throughout the U.S. and possession sold for approximately $2.4 billion. Another block of formal federal spectrum that has nothing to do with meteorological satellite operations was sold for about $42 billion at the same auction. The 1695 to 1710 band is shared under U.S. regulations and my presentation does not take issue with that fact. Sharing spectrum is one way to help support the significant commercial demand for wireless services. However, the balance of the goes are in goes broadcasting 1675 to 1695 megahertz is currently under evaluation as a potential candidate for a future broadband auction. These completed auctions and the ones currently in planning have not yet fulfilled the administration's goal of finding 500 megahertz of radio frequency bandwidth for use by smart phones and tablets. Therefore, further assessments are ongoing to pick the next band or bands that frequencies currently in use by the federal government to be sold at a future auction. Studies are underway that should result in a decision on which frequencies to recommend for the next auction by Mayor June of this calendar year. One of the fastest panel hopes to demonstrate today is that 1675 to 1695 megahertz radio spectrum is already shared with non-federal users. By virtue of the evolved infrastructure where NOAA provides space-based federal transmitters and the ground users include significant non-federal applications from state, local, tribal and private sector entities. In addition, many segments of the US economy depend upon the federal products created from data received in this spectrum to ensure their own economic success or the safety of life and property. We do not intend to dwell today on the intimate details of radio spectrum management, but there is a high likelihood that strong terrestrial signals will create undesirable interference to Earth stations receiving the weak signals coming down from the goes by their satellites and space. Satellite signals are intentionally low in power output to avoid creating interference with conflicts with terrestrial communications. The stronger signals are nearby in frequency. It may be possible to reduce that interference into the Earth station with electronic filters and planned coordination zones, resulting from the current auction per cent. However, both services share the same band, the same spectrum. Building provides no benefit. Desired weather data will be reduced along with the undesired broadband wireless signals. Now, if you look at the broader picture, the weather has a significant impact on the United States. Recent studies led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research finds routine weather events can create an annual economic impact of as much as $485 billion in 2008. Natural disasters add to those numbers. The US has sustained 178 weather events since 1980 where overall damages or costs reached or exceeded $1 billion, including CPI adjustment to 2014. The watch's warnings and private sector products for some of these events utilize the data transmitted in the frequency bands we are discussing. I don't know how interference to direct broadcast might alter those economic impact figures. Do you know that the direct broadcast radio spectrum is utilized by many different non-federal users, such as the private sector whether in the products, in-house meteorological departments, water managers and hydrologists, emergency managers, and local jurisdictions to enable warning sirens for tornadoes in severe weather, and non-federal users that depend upon time-sensitive, high-availability federal products, such as space weather ones. Additional discussions on this topic may be found online from a panel discussion that was held on January 7th, 2005 at the American Meteorological Society's 95th annual meeting, and the slide gives the internet link. Thank you for letting me define the potential interference issue which can impact non-federal end-users' products and services. Thank you. I've got some. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. We can cue up the movie. I'm Mike Johnson from the National Weather Service Office of Science and Technology, and before I have a few slides, but I got this image this morning from our partners at the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. This is a, let me give a little context here because it really drives home the point that I'm going to try to make in my quick presentation. I think some of the other speakers are also going to try to make the same point. That point is the importance of high reliability and low latency, timely data. This is a volcano that erupted two days ago in the Kachapa Peninsula. You can see the plume erupting. It will move through that. And I'll point out of a larger scale here, we have air traffic over the Pacific, typically follows a great arc that goes right near this area. So volcanic ash is particularly a dangerous phenomena for air aviation. And also note, you might not be able to see, but I'll just point out, it looks like the bar is not viewable, but I'll just point out that this is from the Japanese Himawari satellite, which was launched in October. And this satellite is, the imager is a near clone of the GOES-R satellite that we're going to see launched next year. And so the time and the resolution on there are a phenomenal improvement over what we have right now. This time sequence is every 10 minutes, you get a scan and this particular view is a visible half-kilometer grid resolution. So far surpasses anything that we have right now. So that's, I think we'll go over to our, and if there's anybody that's, since I just picked this up this morning, this comes from the Sims blog. I didn't have time to put the website, but anybody that arrested, I can read that website. It's a satellite blog, real-time blog that's available. All sorts of real interesting phenomena that comes up and that we use in the mineralogical community. Okay, so as I said, I'm Mike Johnson. Oh, there he is. All right, I'm Mike Johnson and Office of Science and Technology at National Weather Service. My intent here is not to, I'm gonna defer any sort of frequency type discussion to the experts. My presence here I think is just to talk about what the impacts are at the National Weather Service. So I show this slide because on the right-hand side it says the primary operational concept for those are. And that shows a downlink to these two sites, the Wallops and the North Satellite Operations Facility. Then we have various ways of communicating to our Weather Service offices and centers. And on the left-hand side, the point that I'm trying to make here that I've really emphasized is low latency. That's very important. And you can see for the example that I just showed, if that's evolving on a scale of five to 10 minutes, we need to, and that's something you're not gonna predict in advance, you need to have as much advance warning as you can. So any interruption in that type of service would be a high impact. And then high reliability. You can't, you need communication systems that are very robust. National Weather Service is installing that first slide I just showed, the primary hop system. That's here in the Washington, D.C. Metro area. But you can see we have some very critical sites that are distributed all over covering areas of interest for the U.S. And for that reason, if there was any sort of comms disruption in our normal paths, we built as a redundant capability direct broadcast antennas at these sites. There's seven of them. We have a few Himawari antennas. That's in a different band than I think we're speaking to today, but I put that forward to play this. And I'll talk a little more specifically about what each one of you does. Alaska region headquarters, where we currently have those direct broadcasts and we're going to install a those R direct broadcast capability and possibly a Himawari capability as well. Aviation Weather Center, that's in Kansas City. We're going to have three antennas there. One looking at East, one looking at West, satellite and then a spare. And we provide spares because of the criticality of not losing the data. National Hurricane Center, if you noticed in the previous slide, is in Miami. And so they're obvious, if you happen to have a hurricane that disrupted communications to the Miami area, we definitely need a backup capability to provide communications to that site. Pacific region headquarters, I think I'll love the Pacific region and Alaska region together because they are really satellite-centric warning services for the weather enterprise. There's really very few observations over the Pacific and up in the Arctic. So satellites are critically important. And the example of volcanic ash, an example that I showed for the Himawaris is a good example. Space Weather Prediction Center. They're in Boulder, Colorado. The storm prediction center is in Norman, Oklahoma. And we're developing a, or we're installing a tennis here in the Maryland area at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction in College Park. And we have a Himawari Antenna and Guam. And I'll be going to try to, in the next three slides, just generally summarize what each one of these sites does that is critical in the light on geostationary data. So Alaska region, volcanic ash, the Alaska region volcanic ash center is there. They put out warnings and advisories covering the area that they're responsible for, which includes looking at volcanoes that are along the Russian East Coast. And you can imagine that a lot of that, the Plume Act can be actually advanced east and into the Alaska area. So that's a fairly active region for volcanoes. They have a large marine fire weather and public forecast warming area. Aviation Weather Center, they're responsible for warnings and forecasts with domestic and international aviation. So they rely on, and they're going to be increasingly rely on the very high resolution data that's going to come from those are. And more hurricane center, I've already spoken to their their role. I think most people are familiar with what the hurricane center does Pacific region. They cover all the weather enterprise elements that the Weather Service is responsible for, specifically green, aviation, tropical and the Pacific hurricane center is there. And then as well as public morning and communication. Space Weather Prediction Center, I'll say a little bit more about the Space Weather Prediction Center. That's in Boulder, Colorado. That's somewhat unique in that, that the derived products that come from goes are are going to be produced on site and bolder directly derived from the, from the direct broadcast. That's different than every other product goes on. So they're more reliant on the direct broadcasting than other sites. And then the Storm Prediction Center, which is in Norman, Oklahoma. And they look at the convective warning, our convective watches. And I think most folks are familiar with what the Storm Prediction Center does. Finally, the NOAA site here in College Park. There are three centers that are primarily analyzed at the Ocean Prediction Center. They do marine forecasts outside of the coastal areas of the continental U.S. And the Weather Prediction Center, hydrometeological guidance, the Climate Prediction Center, they're less of an impact, but they're also located. They're more a week to and beyond forecasted. It's not like the DB is not likely to be a large impact for them. And then the central operations, which includes the environmental modeling center, which is the site for the national weather models, which is of course reliant on satellite data. So in summary, the service is installing direct broadcast antennas at seven critical locations, and key, if you include one. Capability is essential to high reliability and availability of the data. And the weather service missions at these sites are covered with the weather enterprise missions for the life and property. Let's turn it back. Thank you very much. All right, next we have Mike Steinberg. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me here today. I believe I'm the only one here from America's weather and climate industry, and I appreciate the opportunity to provide some thoughts from that perspective. AccuWeather and many other companies make extensive use of weather satellite data received from a variety of sources around the world via several distribution mechanisms. One second. Let me give you a little background. We use this data in the production of our suite of weather forecasts, warnings, and other content that's delivered to consumers and business. The upper picture there that you see is our global headquarters and forecast center in State College, Pennsylvania, and those rainbows are there every Tuesday, by the way. We also have research and operations centers in Montreal, Wichita, and Manila, Oklahoma, and a sales center in Rockefeller, center in New York City. The lower picture just shows there's a dot there for each of the data calls we serve in one day. As red dots, in total we serve more than 9 billion data calls to one and a half billion people worldwide each day with our content available in over 100 different languages and dialects. We think that makes us the world's most viewed weather forecast provider, at least we like to think that's the case. Our content's available for all digital media, including smartphones, tablets, wider mobile internet sites, digital signage, through connected systems like connected cars, smart homes, connected appliances, there'll be a lot more of that place as we move over the next few years. Through traditional media, we provide forecasts and other content to nearly 2,000 radio and television stations and newspapers, and of course to their audiences, and we provide customized services to more than 1,000 businesses and government agencies through active enterprise solutions. We serve with that portion of our business, 77 of the Fortune 100 companies and 54 of the Fortune Global 100 that we provide various customer services to. To do all of this, we rely upon and receive a large amount of foundational data from NOAA National Weather Service that includes their satellite data. We are a proud NOAA Weather Ready Nation ambassador and we directly provide actionable weather warnings to business and consumers globally. We do make all our own forecasts, but we also make available and pass on all of the NOAA National Weather Service warnings and other forecasts and statements. We also have agreements with dozens of national MEC services all around the world, various state and local agencies and a number of private sector data creators, all of whom supply us with important data that we use to generate the forecast for the whole world. The issue of allocation of the radio spectrum and impacts on companies in the American weather industry is an important and interesting one. On the one hand, this one, we recognize that continued need to evaluate and optimize federal radio spectrum assignments and allocations as consumer electronics, mobile technology and the internet of things, experience, explosive growth, sector growth that in fact results in significant growth for America's weather industry as new devices and platforms arise all over the world. On the other hand, that's this one, this growth cannot put in jeopardy the core delivery methods that are used by governments and America's weather industry to reliably collect, aggregate and deliver foundational weather data because what those do is they provide mission-critical life-saving weather products. We cannot, as a weather enterprise, unite in our common goals of saving lives and improving the quality of life for the world's citizens, allow this to occur. Quite simply, these radio spectrum we're discussing are currently utilized for critical purposes that have significant value to the world in saving lives, protecting property and growing the American economy. We're one of the many non-federal entities that leverage multiple receive-only ground stations for the reception of real-time weather satellite data and what we do is we actually have multiple down-links at multiple facilities as well as direct high-speed line connected to the NOAA Gateway in Stiflin, Maryland, multiple NOAA port systems, internet and a whole variety of methodologies that we use to ensure that almost no matter what happens, we have all the data reliably in our time. Today, we leverage GVAR data streams from the current those satellites and in the future, we'll be leveraging the GRB broadcast in order to use real-time data from the GOZAR satellites. Satellite ground stations are important for the speed and reliability of the real-time data retrievals. The internet's also an important delivery method and while we do use that as part of our redundancy strategy, for the redundancy and reliability of delivery, users really cannot rely on one method to get their critical data. And so an additional complete data stream of imagery and sounder data is available on an equal basis to all users via broadcast. These issues are increasingly important as we move toward GOZAR with the availability of huge volumes of data, extremely useful for ours and others critical operations and completely new data elements such as the global lightning mapper capability. There have been some suggestions previously of creating buffer zones around key federal sites to limit interference, but that doesn't solve the issue because there are many others in America's weather industry and the academic community who reliably need this data for mission critical operations. Well, I certainly don't claim to have all the answers as to how we address these issues. So I'm looking forward to our discussion today of ongoing discussions and collaboration addressing these potential radio spectrum issues directly and collaboratively as a community. Within America's weather enterprise, the private, public, and educational sectors have worked together successfully in a number of areas and have been increasingly partnering for the benefit of the economy and public safety over the past decade. And I think that as we work collaboratively, we can ensure decision makers are aware of the critical uses of this information transmitted via these parts of the radio spectrum. I've listed some questions here that I think we should consider as to how we move on with this. First of all, how do we get the message out to a wide variety of potentially impacted users to help us gain their support? How do we present the message coherently and simply enough to make it resonate with other decision makers? How do we effectively educate and engage legislators, the FCC and other decision makers, both individually and collectively as a community? How can we leverage the existing weather organizations, some of which are actively involved in educational and lobbying efforts to help with these issues? Those would include NOAA National Weather Service, Weather Ready Nation and Weather Ready Nation Ambassadors Program, American Meteorological Society, National Weather Association, the American Weather and Climate Industry Association, the National Council of Industrial Meteorologists and the Weather Coalition, among others. What are the best venues to educate and build support within the user community? National Weather Service partners meetings, Miller's satellite conferences, AMS webinars and meetings or other possibilities. And finally, given the national deficit and the current political climate, I think a new source of revenue is very tempting and we need to keep in mind that even though the use of this data and its current transmission may be critical, the government might decide to spell the spectrum regardless of our view that the value it brings in its current use. So what level of backup plan do we need in place if that does happen? That's the end of my prepared remarks. I look forward to your discussion. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here, Steve. This is a very important issue to us and we want to share some of our uses of the go-to satellite, DCS and how we are able to use it in stringage. So before I move ahead, let me just point out that you're looking at a photograph of the Mohawk River at Mohawk Falls and that little shelter down the bottom left is a US go-to-stringage. Sorry, I'm a big mom. Sorry. Now it's falling. Now it's falling. So now you see the Mohawk Falls and you see a little stringage on the bottom. So those are the devices that we're concentrating on. Just a word about the USGS. We're not particularly our organization. We're only about what much part of the core or the weather service we're nesting. About a billion dollars in our budget. We're set here to describe and understand the earth and share information about it. We're actually in the earth information business and the three things that we do a lot of. We do research. We do a little bit of assessment for instance for droughts or for floods. And we do a lot of monitoring. And this is the piece that I thought would be the most interesting and certainly most acceptable to this particular topic. So going on, this is some list of some of the monitoring that we do. This is just a pull down a day one day of the various kinds of parameters that we monitor. And those parameters includes things like water quality, salinity, temperature, different kinds of metals, pesticides, or in water around the country. But most importantly, they also include screen flow or discharge that's highlighted in here. Some 8,000 dating stations around the country monitor 24-7 screen gauging or screen flow rather. And rivers ranging from the Mississippi to the smaller territories. It can be as small as a fraction of a square mile to the Baton Rouge on Mississippi. As I said, one of the more important to those, at least for my business, is screen flow. Screen flow is used in a variety of, screen flow information is used in a variety of decision making. Some of it is design oriented. So how do you build a dam? How large should it be? How high should a bridge be? Folks don't often appreciate that a lot of the transportation structures depend on passage over water, over rivers. And figuring out how high the bridge should be is something that requires a lot of data to do. There's a lot of needs for your information on screen flow for monitoring or rather for operating water treatment or wastewater treatment plants. Those sorts of things go on 24-7. And those are things that have immediate impact. So it's very important for our screen flow information to be available, to be reliable, and to be timely. And we take great pride in doing all those things. And we depend, again, on all the GODS DCS to make that happen. This next slide is just a summary of some of the characteristics of the screen gauging network. And you'll see here, again, around 8,100 gauging stations around the country. They're all real-time. And they most depend on GODS satellite. I'd say 98% of them do. And in a recent evaluation of the federal networks of observation systems of a variety of kinds, the screen gauging network ran down pretty well. Of the 120 or so that we were looking at, the screen gauging network comes in around number 13. So it's fairly important to a variety of agencies and a variety of users. The network runs us around $160 million a year. But here's what's really important. There's some 850 state and local agencies that help us fund that network. We actually take money from others to do this work. And they are very happy to provide it. And I've provided a little bit of the funding background down at the bottom. You see, about half of the monies that we need for operating the network come from state or local agencies. So it's something that has an impact down at the ground level, where citizens are dependent upon their local communities, their counties, their states, for one service or another. The picture in the right corner is a picture of the network. In this case, I'm using a report that come in yesterday to illustrate the current water conditions as of yesterday. Relative to this time of year, if you look up there, you see the things that are in green are more or less normal, the things that are dark colors, the blue pan, paralleling the high of L is high flow. Those are running very high, as is in northwest. And you see in southwest there's drought going on. All this from an instant picture from one little place, from one little place, but one part of our system where we've integrated it all. Again, it's very important to us to have something that's uniform in terms of communications. Gov's provides us that. We don't have to pipe data from one type of radio to another and pass it through some sort of system patchwork in a sense. I wanted to just show you the diagram. I won't try and explain it, but I will say that there are a number of backups that are included in the Gov's process. We do receive data from a number of downlink sites. And those sites themselves are what I think are most important, are most concerned to me. Will we be able to continue to operate them with a heavy interference should we share the spectrum? And here are just a few comments about our Gov's usage. And in this, you'll see that the Gov's system is fairly important to the USGS. It turns out the USGS is fairly important to the Gov's system. We use a far number, by far, the largest user of the Gov's system, Gov DCS. We have a number of channels reserved for our use, and we fund it at a fairly low level. And by that, I mean it's a fairly inexpensive system. It makes it possible for us to do stream gaging at a relatively inexpensive cost. For the same amount of money that we pay in a year, we might want to pay a subscription for somebody else for a month if we had to go that round, say, cell phone, or something of that nature. So again, it's important to us to have the system. I wanted to mention just a few things that sort of compare and contrast the strains and weakness of Gov's. And among those, I just mentioned, the Gov's is a very reliable system for us with a relatively low cost. There are some weaknesses that we'd like to be able to address. Most important of those is that it's not a two-way communication stream. We are not able to talk pretty much with our gaging stations, and we would like to be able to. There are a few things we might be able to do to improve our efficiency where we're able to. So again, I'm concerned, we're concerned about the impacts of sharing or spelling off the spectrum, particularly in those places where we have down links, and I tried to illustrate that in this illustration here, that it might be interrupted or in the beard loops. So, I'm sorry, I'm not advancing up here. I'm trying one and two different projections. I can't see the signs. So here are a few questions to parting out, very similar to what you heard before. But given that Gov's is a fairly weak signal, are we able to rely on it if we have to share that spectrum? Are there ways of buffering or filtering, as we heard earlier, if the Gov's signals in a way that preserves their continuity and clarity for us to use and to pass on? And then given that our signals are fairly low power, they have to be for us, for speed gauges, we operate most of those gaging stations off of solar panels and global batteries. So they're not connected to a power group. That's very important for us not to be able to, or not to have to over-tap the systems with the transmit. So with that, I guess I'll pass it on and thank you very much for your attention. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Good afternoon, I'm Jack Brown. I'm the director of the Office of Emergency Management in a very small county across the river from here. Arlington County, I think we're the, one of the most densely populated counties, so geographically one of the smallest counties in the country. We're about 26 square miles, but if you take out Reagan National Airport, the park, land, the Pentagon Reservation and Baysmire, Anderson Hall, and all the other federal footprint, we're down to about 16, 16 and a half square miles. So we're pretty small, but it's a great place to live, work, play, come on over, spend your tax money, spend your money, so I get the tax revenue, excuse me. We love our business. We have a lot of visitors to the many sites in Arlington, but I'm not really here representing Arlington. I'm gonna talk about Arlington's specific incident, but I'm here representing my professional organization in the International Association of Emergency Managers. So while I'm not an expert in GOES DCS, I'm a user and my colleagues around the country and in fact around the world use platforms like this every day, and we're very concerned about any impact to the capabilities that we have. And certainly the commercialization of this spectrum does cause us some concern. I think working with our professional organization, some of the other first responders, like the police chiefs, the International Association of the Chiefs of Police and the International Association of Fire Chiefs, and I'm a member of that organization as well. I think maybe we could leverage some of those partnerships to raise those concerns. So I was gonna show you a little video clip, but I don't think I'm hooked up to the internet, but anyway, back on June 29th, 2012 throughout the day, we knew that there was gonna be some pretty serious weather coming through the national capital region here. And I'm gonna say around 10 o'clock at night, I was notified by our emergency management duty officer that this was a pretty serious storm coming our way. And in fact, he suggested that we open our emergency operations center. I said, well, what time do you think it's gonna hit? He says, oh, it's gonna hit in the next 15 minutes to a half hour. I said, absolutely not. Not gonna put people in harm's way to go activate our EOC, if you will. Let's just let the storm go through. We had sent out a number of alerts to our residents and visitors to let them know of the impending weather, stay inside, their seat shelter, those types of things. And if you're not signed up for your local emergency alerts in your community or where you work, please do. In Arlington County, it's called Arlington Alert. And you can go to our website, www.arlingtonalert.com, sign up for it. It's really, really simple and very valuable information. So as you can see the direct show itself, I'd never heard that time until after the storm hit. I'm trying to, can I stand up? Yeah, sure, sure. I'm horrible sitting and speaking. Actually, I'm horrible speaking. I'll give you a mic because it's being taped up. And I'm vertically challenged anyway, so I'll just kind of walk around a little bit. Do you think we're gonna give you a mic? Oh, absolutely. You can see it covered 650 miles. This storm actually started off around Iowa's 350 miles wide. By the time it got here, we're looking at kind of hurricane course winds, which we're not really used to here in D.C. every now and then we get some storms that might have gusts that hot, but this was a very, very powerful storm. And we had had some other storms over the last few years, microbursts and things like that that caused some serious damage, but this one really packed a punch on us. I know this is kind of the end point, but situational awareness for us is key. And in every incident that we have, we always go back and look at, what was the information that we had that we had prior to the event, if there was any? How did we share that? Did the right people get the information at the right time? We have issues with communications infrastructure. This particular storm actually, one of the cascading impacts of it was the impact to our 911 system. We use a carrier that everybody's familiar with. I'm not gonna write them out too bad here, but they had a failure of a couple of their generators. And actually our 911 system in our county was down. That didn't happen until about 7.30, 7.45 the next morning, Saturday the 30th, but it had a huge impact on our community. We activated our emergency operation center. That was a full activation for us. A lot of times we'll do things virtually. We'll just have people call in or conference calls and we'll use a web-based system kind of communicate and collaborate. But for this one, we brought people in. Power restoration. Two thirds of our county was without power. Some for up to eight days. Huge. It was high. It was summertime. We have a lot of folks who are in various levels of assisted living, everything from private homes all the way up to hospitals, nursing homes, living facilities. And if you look at Arlington County, a lot of high-rise buildings. So we had a couple of our high-rise structures with some older folks, intern folks, where the generators had failed, where the power had failed in there. And it was pretty hot on the 10th and 11th floor of some of these buildings. It was terrible. Some of the other things that we learned from this is the need to always have a handle on your staffing, particularly the first responders, police and fire. They always step up to the plate. But it really does get down to personal preparedness at every level. Not just the county with our capabilities, but down to the individual level. Individuals and families and schools and businesses just get so important for all of us to be prepared. And then there's a lot of debris that gets created when you have these kinds of storms. And when you're in Arlington, where do you put it? Where do you gather it? Where do you aggregate it at? And what are you gonna do with it? We can't just dump it somewhere. So a lot of that. There was a lot of good things that happened that we learned and we want to capitalize on. First off, our internal and external communications just amongst each other within the county, but also with the public, with the power down and a lot of our communications mediums, people couldn't turn on their TV. Hopefully they had a battery operated radio. We actually operated an AM radio station. We're getting ready to actually add an SM capability to that if people have battery operated radios. We were communicating with people by our AM radio, but we also leveraged the community through our community emergency response team to actually go door to door, particularly to the vulnerable populations and to the folks that might be on the other side of the digital divide and actually hand out flyers in English and Spanish to tell them what was going on, what they could do to stay safe, give them as much updated information as we could. Again, personal and organizational preparedness, and of course, we say this in our EOC all the time, you know, be happy and be flexible because most of these operations like this go over a period of operational periods. We use 12-hour operational periods. We went from one o'clock in the morning on the 30th until midnight on July 4th. So our EOC was activated 24-7. And that's kind of a campaign operation for us. Warning, National Weather Service. As I said, we got a lot of weather information throughout the day. I think in retrospect, for me as the emergency manager, it would have been nice to know more the ferocity of this particular storm. We knew it was going to be bad, but for me personally, it didn't really click until about a half hour before this thing hit. How horrible this was going to be. I've already dimed out Verizon there on the phone system there. I gotta give them a lot of credit. They've done a lot of work since we had this particular incident. There was a number of investigations done conducted by the FCC, the State Corporation Commission, in Virginia. The governor of Virginia actually appointed some elected and appointed staff folks like me to an investigative body to work with Verizon and try to keep this from happening again. And this was actually human error. They didn't check their generators. They should have checked their generators. They put the systems in place and they have communicated much better with us since then. For us, just intersections. It was huge if people were driving up and down the streets and there's no traffic signal. So our police chief got out there. We used every communication medium. We told everybody to just treat every intersection as a four-way stop sign. Please slow down. Please be careful out there. Because while we didn't have any fatalities in Arlington, Fairfax County did have a couple of fatalities as a direct result of this storm. One was electrocuted, one was crushed by a falling tree. Again, our 911 service was out for four days. So what do you do if you don't have 911 in the community? I mean, we told the citizens to basically go to the local firehouse and our fire stations are pretty closely grouped together in an urban community like that, like that a police officer. And we were actually left firefighters and police officers in the fire stations to be like the 911 center. And they were using their portable radios to call back to the, or ECC, or Emergency Communication Center to dispatch resources. But then a couple of days into it, the community emergency response team said, hey, maybe we can take over that task for you. And they did. So we actually used citizens with radios in the fire stations to be the 911 center out in the field. And that worked really, really well. In fact, somebody walked into the station down in Crystal City and said, hey, by the way, the Harris Theater down the street, I think there's a fire. And we sent resources down to the guys out really, really, really quick. Excuse me. I think I already talked about the generator maintenance, Verizon. It's so important that systems provide not just redundancy, but that they're checked. And then we have a system, that the system of systems is checked. So again, Verizon has done a lot of great work. Power restoration. A lot of folks don't understand why their power is not coming back along with the people across the street when their power is coming along. I mean, that just happens. And we got a lot of questions. We actually did a lot of community education on our power grid, how it's set up, and why one area is gonna come up maybe before your area comes up. A lot of people, they still don't wanna hear it because they see the lights on across the street. But I think our power company, the Minion Power, did young men's work because when they're out there restoring this power, their worker's safety is the utmost importance. And they can't start sometimes working on it until some trees are removed or we're not gonna start removing trees around live wire. So there's a lot of coordination that has to occur between the power crews and the public works people that are actually working with the down trees. Vulnerable populations, again, just our human services folks were in all of these facilities, communicating with them constantly throughout the life cycle of this event, making sure that people were safe, making the arrangements that we needed to to evacuate people. A lot of folks were evacuated to family members. So we worked with everybody with the facilities and the family members to take care of folks. And we didn't lose anybody in any one of these facilities. So we did learn a lot of lessons about that. You know, some of the shelters that we would normally use really weren't available to us. I mean, because they didn't have generators. So we've done some things since then to make sure that some of our facilities that didn't have generators now are generators. And we've worked with some of these assisted living facilities to make sure that they have power over all the generations that have done this as well. Communications with the power companies, excellent at the management level. One of the things we found out in the field is sometimes the crews didn't communicate as well as they could. And that may have slowed up some of the progress. So we were working with them. We actually institute or re-incorporate the folks in the field in our instant command system that we use very much like when we're coordinating the activities at a fire or a law enforcement event. And we've done much better since then. A lot of damage. Again, no fatalities, 1.6 mil in private property damage, 872,000 in public property damage. And in comparison to the snow events of 2009 and 2010, about half. Very hot out there, lots of foaming out. It's just really, really hot. 60% of our county was without power, some of it for up to eight days. And Dominion Power brought in workers from around the country, and actually, Canada, we had all the power back on, restored in the county by July of 2008. So a lot of great work by a lot of people. The slides right there, those two fellows in those yellow lists, those are community volunteers. That's the community emergency response team. We have over 500 trained community members in Arlington County that are there for response. They work in the neighborhoods. So they're the first ones out there. They're the first of the first responders, if you will. And they're trained in everything from utility control, how to shut off power, shut off gas to first aid, to light search and rescue to firefighting, you name it. They're actually trained by our fire department and my staff in emergency management. And after the direction, we put them in a little bit of a non-traditional role by making them emergency communications dispatchers. So we're very, very proud of that. It really, our community came together. Arlington County has a number, it has dozens of civic associations and the folks really do band together and it really is about people helping people. So all of our county facilities are open. It's cooling centers, they had power, we opened the doors, we brought water in, just get people out of the heat and just be nice to them. It was a mobilization, basically, of the entire county, our parks department or department of environmental services, crews were out there 24-7 doing everything they could to get the debris removed, to get the power back on and restore the county back to some sense of normalcy. And to me, the real stars of the show were the human services folks who were working with the vulnerable population in the assisted living facilities, the police department, the fire department and the folks in public works who were out there cutting all those trees. So all total of 416 of our staff were numerous 24-7 shifts during the recovery, totaling about 40,000 hours. And we used every platform we had from pieces of paper and fires to our AM radio station, to our Arlington Alert System, to news broadcasts and news conferences or with the local media to get as much information and including town hall meetings to get information out to the public because that's really what it's all about. And in my humble opinion, any large emergency really is gonna be driven by the public. The public can make or break our response. And people often say, well, no, it's all about fire police. Well, you know what? They're trained, they got the equipment, they have the training, but if the community doesn't act appropriately, let's say it's a dirty bomb and the community decides they're gonna run to all the local elementary schools to get the kids out, they can actually inhibit the ingress and egress of public safety assets. So we really need our community to be prepared, to be informed, and we look at them as partners, not as liabilities. So we increased our subscription on our Arlington Alert. Actually, it's a little bit higher than that now. We are linked in with Twitter and Facebook. We send stuff out over every platform that I know of just to get information out to folks. Again, lessons learned. It's a command. We use that. It's called the National Incident Management System. We use it every day, not just in Arlington, but throughout this region and throughout this country. We do find, because we have a huge turnover, a lot of folks in our community are not prepared and it's not actually on their radar screen to be prepared. So we're continually working. We're never done with the preparedness efforts here. So, September is Awareness Preparedness Month around the country and we always have activities that really reinforce that during the month of September, but we also do it throughout the year. Victoria and Secure World and Carolina and AMS for folding this panel and bringing this important issue with the light. It's really a great opportunity to even be in the same room with some of our customers that we've heard about and that was really great. I also realized that it's about four after one and the melatonin from the fabulous lunch is taking in, so I'll try to get through this fairly quickly. I bring the perspective as the guy who's had to bring the technical world together to make sharing of NOAA satellites spectrum work as best as we can within the realities of the 21st century consumer in the laws of physics. It's not working for any of the portion. Can you turn it on? Is that better? Hold on. I hit the button. Yeah. Okay. There it was. Okay. So I'll spend a few minutes providing my own perspectives on the recently concluded polar satellite spectrum auction in conjunction with a couple of other bands and its impact on our satellite operations. There are key lessons learned from preparing for that auction that most certainly applied any future auctions and although we didn't collaborate, I think I may have answered at least a couple of the acu-weather questions. The first question you might ask are, why us or why did they take our spectrum and want more? The IEEE published a really good article containing this chart back in October 2010 that answers these questions. The answer is actually pretty simple. Both NOAA and the broadband industry want the same band for the same reasons. The arrow shows the approximate location of the frequencies in which most of NOAA's weather satellites transmit data. These frequencies are located right in the middle of the broadband sweet spot as depicted by the red block at the top of the chart. NOAA's sweet spot is also in the red block. We both want frequencies that aren't bothered by things going on in the atmosphere or inside buildings. We both want transmissions that penetrate building. For example, none of you want to miss that important text that's coming in while you're listening to all of us up here on the platform. We both want our signals to travel in a straight line and not follow the curvature of the earth. We both like this band because broadcasts in these frequencies are not affected by bad weather, especially at heavy rain. Finally, equipment that operates in this band requires small antennas. Imagine trying to use your smartphone if you had to carry a big antenna on your back all the time. If weather satellites and commercial broadband providers like to use the same frequencies, what's the tiebreaker to decide who stays and who moves somewhere else? The simplistic view is to follow money. I've compared the current budgets and middles of all U.S. civil space agencies conducting remote sensing and earth science missions. This includes NOAA, the Landsat portion of USGS. I'm probably sure they include the data collection that Luke Bunkie of the bottom billion mentioned, and various NASA earth science and climate spacecraft. As you can see, the net revenue generated from the recent auction of frequencies in which most of the satellite programs operate was about 10 times the combined budgets of the three agencies operating these satellites and building the future ones. If money were the only criterion, we would be shutting off weather satellites right now. Fortunately, that's not the case. We're marking on a scheme where we share the frequency bands. Spectrum auctions are here to stay. My previous chart demonstrated the value of spectrum to the broadband industry and the enormous amount of money they paid for 65 megahertz of spectrum before building a single tower, signing up a single customer or hosting a single selfie. The demands for bandwidth will continue to be insatiable, not only by the public, but also by other huge economic sectors. Pick up the paper almost any day, sorry, read it on your smart, read the website on your smartphone, and you will most likely find a story about new ways that the medical transportation or agricultural sectors consume broadband. The laws of physics and economics say that the available bandwidth can only come from spectrum currently occupied by government users, such as NOAA. Commercial broadband providers and equipment manufacturers are much more able to quickly respond to changes in spectrum use or public demands than government agencies. For example, all of your iPhone 6s will be obsolete before the end of this year. Satellite and ground systems generally require about 10 years on average to design and build at very long-life times on orbit and last many years beyond our design lives. As a result, we are locked into the same designs and product distribution systems for decades. In one of the early spectrum sharing meetings in 2010, I had another government colleague comment to me, what you know what people do with direct downlifts is sow 70s. Guilty is charged. There is the general expectation that government systems can simply move to a different frequency to give up spectrum. While it may be straightforward for systems exclusively used by the government, such as military or law enforcement agencies, redesigning systems such as NOAAs that connect to the non-federal sector, as we heard today, can result in significant cost and operational impacts. The next two charts illustrate these costs and impacts using a very familiar example from the not-so-distant past. How many of you guys remember the digital TV converter boxes and coupons? Yep. I ordered my two. How many of you bought converter boxes for your analog television sets? Full disclosure, I bought two of the insignia ones from Best Buy. How many of you bought brand new flat-screen, high-definition television sets, costing a couple thousand dollars and the new digital home theater systems you had to buy in order to be compatible with your new television? How many of you built these costs into your family budgets? I wanna ask how many of you incurred consumer debt in the process? Spectrum auctions, as we experienced during the digital television conversion, caused users, us, to either spend money we had budgeted to spend or continue to receive television broadcasts or simply decide that we weren't going to watch television anymore. Present and future auctions of weather satellite spectrum will require significant changes, perhaps costly ones, among our user communities that we are going to continue to provide the timely and accurate weather data our citizens deserve. I'm not quite done with the digital TV story yet. After you bought all those new television and home theater systems, how did you get rid of the obsolete hardware that you don't even get in your business? As you can see here, somebody came up with a low-cost solution and since they've done three analog television sets alongside the road of my dirt road in Western Loudoun County, Virginia. I don't recall anyone offering coupons for a free disposal at a local landfill or holding special disposal days in local communities. Instead, the program was designed such that dumping televisions alongside of the road was an option. Just these three televisions polluted the landscape, still present injury hazards to humans and animals and they contain toxic chemicals that can leach into the ground. Will we have adverse consequences in the weather satellite sector? We'll shortly find out. As we proceed down the path leading towards sharing of NOAA's polar satellite frequencies, several lessons learned resulted that I think are important to take into the future. Some industry standard analyses used to calculate interference characteristics and ultimately the size of the protection zones were shown to be outdated or sorely in need of revision. It is up to us to demonstrate through testing that these standards do in fact need revising. We were grateful for the participation of many domestic and international individuals and groups in the public comment period for the polar spectrum sharing. We can do better in encouraging more parties to respond and actively participate. We found that most regulators and policy makers understood that GOES provides nightly weather images and that rebroadcasts such as MLIN are essential to the success of first responders, but we were less successful explaining a more abstract concept such as the criticality of ingesting polar satellite data into numerical weather models. Ironically, all of this happened before Hurricane Sandy, which demonstrated the value of model accuracy. Thanks to many forecasters and broadcast meteorologists, terms like GFS and the European model are now household words inside the subway. Regulators and policy makers declared that non-federal users would not be afforded protection. Those users, unfortunately, weren't that organized and vocal enough to effectively push back. I think we eventually did an okay job protecting our critical polar sites, but we need to do a better job defining the role that non-operational science and non-federal users play. Deloitte in a 2014 study for the broadband industry examined complexities involved with sharing a ban with government incumbents such as NOAA. This graphic kind of looks like a Myers-Briggs personality breakdown, and actually it's not all that far off. The least complex sharing arrangement and consequently, what we're using in the polar world is the lower left block near the intersection of the horizontal and vertical axes. Static and continually defined is most closely aligned with the polar spectrum protection zones. Critical sites are fixed in location and transmission characteristics are known, and that's actually fairly straightforward to be able to share those bans, at least with protection zones. As a completely opposite end of the scale, it's a situation we will face if the Go spectrum is ever auctioned. Because M1 and Go's rebroadcast is used by federal, state, and local governments for severe weather and natural disaster events, we cannot establish fixed protection zones because we do not know when, where, and for how long first responders will deploy. They will be highly dynamic in terms of geography and time. And according to the Deloitte study, this type of sharing arrangement is the least desirable for the commercial broadband industry. Does this mean that the regulators and policy makers will leave us alone? Does this mean that the broadband industry will decide that it's too tough and look elsewhere? Will the future administration and Congress direct us to take measures to make this ban more desirable? Time will tell. When the sharing of polar spectrum begins, those customers most likely to see interference are non-federal users receiving direct readout products from polar satellites. Geography is everything. If you're lucky enough to be located inside or very close to a protection zone, you stand a good chance of remaining mostly interference free. If you were located within one of the top 100 broadband markets but outside a protection zone, you have a high likelihood of experiencing interference, especially during periods of heavy broadband use. If you were lucky enough to live outside one of the top 100 markets, your probability of receiving interference is reduced. Where are the top 100 markets, you ask? There they are. I'll also point out that nine of the protection zones for the polar systems are located within areas comprising the 100 broadband markets. So there's a lot of incentive for the private sector to make sharing work because they certainly want access to potential customers in these markets. So as we move ahead into the future, perhaps involving those products and services sharing, there are a few emphasis areas I think we can take ahead. First of all, I applaud AMS's willingness to be a visible and influential focal point. Your spirit influence encompasses the halls of Congress right now to broadcast meteorologists who can bring this issue into every American home. Ironically, AMS can also communicate the message by the very broadband systems who desire access to our spectrum. I encourage you to emphasize the full scope of potential impacts of first responders that cannot do their jobs, protecting and serving their citizens without uninterrupted satellite reception from those and those are. I would also urge you to capture these ideas in non-technical terms that general public can understand. I encourage you to seek out any of all opportunities to speak and publicly participate in comment periods and in forums like this. I know it's a tedious job to routinely search federal register and regulatory agency websites constantly to discover relevant notices that require comment and if you find that person, pay them as much as they want. With the resources available to AMS, I would consider conducting simulations that could demonstrate impacts of interference to those and those are satellite broadcasts. I would call this exercise a day without MWID. This could be modeled like Department of Defense exercises for a day without GPS or a day without SATCOM. It would be interesting to determine if MWID and other products corrupted by interference would have made a difference in warning about this week's severe weather in the Southern U.S. To wrap up, we in the weather-ready nation business must ensure that we remain ready to become even more ready. From the satellite's radar's balloons and screen gauges that provide forecasts and warning given, right down through state and local government first responders, the private sector and the broadcast meteorologist media. While the temptation to focus on enormous auction revenue numbers is great, we must not forget that we owe our fellow citizens the very best and accurate forecasts and recovery operations possible. As we have seen time and time again, uninterrupted and survival communication is the backbone of a weather-ready nation. Thanks, and I look forward to the discussion. Thank you, Mark. We have about half an hour left, and so we'll see if there are any really pressing questions. If so, I'll ask you to wait for the mic to come to you and then identify yourself. Actually, I have a question for the panel. It seems that there is an agreement amongst the panelists that like or not, auctioning is probably going to have to be done again. And one of the issues we discussed or one of the questions that we were thinking about is what are our options for mitigating this type of interference? How do we, as it was requested, backup plan and this sort of thing? And also, panelists, keep your mind mics on and off, if you're talking about local government. Any thoughts? Oh, I said from a technical standpoint, having a signal in the same frequency band as your earth station is a different problem than having it next door. Next door, you might have some opportunities to reduce it. So I'm afraid users that are non-federal that wouldn't be in any kind of a zone that would keep signals away from them, which is the main really way to solve the problem. I'm going to have to come up with a solution where their antennas are located remotely. Perhaps the shield is in some fashion, but it's going to be very difficult because the user awareness not only of how you get your data from an earth station is about the same level of user awareness as if I ask everybody in this room, what frequency do your cell phone operate on right now? Because one, you probably do not know. And two, they are software-defined radios, and as some of the spectrum is sold, it could change. Martin. Yeah, I guess I would just answer that. And as I mentioned earlier, we designed and launched these satellite systems to provide a 10-year lead time. And if you look at the acquisition and launch schedule on our website for the GOESR series, we launched the last GOESR, and it reaches its end of mission sometime around 2040. And I'll be 86 years old when that happens. The satellite guy in me is a big fan of things like relay satellites, of things like remote antennas, but that requires a huge investment. And the argument that you get as well is to send stuff over the internet. And I think it would be a pretty hard job to run primary and redundant internet lines from all of the screen pages around the country, or from rooms of volcanoes that we don't know might have run, back to one of the NOAA centers. So a satellite communication is used because it's survivable and because it works and because you don't have to rely on the ground infrastructure. I'd like to make three points. Can you actually please identify yourself? I'm Robert Peters. I'm with the GOESR program at NASA on communications. One of my standard examples is that this network wanted to establish terrestrial applications about 10 megahertz away from our telemetry. And if you compare the ratio of their power to the power of the signal we receive as a distance, it's comparing the dynamic range of sand to a distance roughly half way to Mars. And this would be 10 megahertz away. There's no way you can filter out that kind of signal on the ground. And the first point, second point, Robert is already receiving interference from Health Square from Newport News. And that's about 130, 140 miles away. And we're considering staying on some of the 25 miles. That wasn't encouraging. And a lot of M1 users, the Earth Station is mounted on the back of the pickup truck. And it'd be hard to see how you could protect that. I'd like to ask you, GSE, how would we engage the 850 users? That would seem to be a good resource we should try to engage. To our response? So let's turn it back on then. Those users are very well wired into the use of the gaming stations. And they're very active. When things go down, they complain very loudly. They're to us. In the past, we have notified them that the spectrum's cells were occurring. And many of them have responded with concern to FCC or to Congressional. I would assume we would do the same in this case, just to point out that it's occurring and seeking their input on the whole process. And any specific ideas they might have for us, USGS, as to how we might address the problem with other sorts of technologies or other strategies with communications? I think Bob's answer kind of relates to the point that in many cases, these meteorological or hydrological products are they themselves, the intermediate step in the process. And that it's the person that will be affected by the floods or affected by drought. Or the aviation user that receives space weather data that needs to reroute their flights. There's one more step in this process and that the information has a benefit to a sector of the economy of which that particular sector could be impacted. And I think it's hard for us to convey to them to translate this into how does interference back here in the less understood weather infrastructure affect someone here? But I'm afraid that in many of these cases, it appears that it does. I think that's even, you said that would be difficult. It may be impossible to get that across to people because we rationalize a lot of things. I can rationalize, oh no, I'm not going to get a flood where I live, but I use my cell phone every day and would love to have more data and master bandwidth. So I think that's gonna be tough. Education is important, but I suspect it needs to be a little higher level than the general public if it's gonna be effective, although we need to do everything before I agree with you that way. Let us raise the question, how do you get policymakers educated about this issue? Yeah, I mentioned earlier about the responses to the notices of the rulemaking. For the proposed at the time, Polar satellite auction, somebody in our operations office had the brilliant idea to send a notice out on Emlyn. So at least the people that used Emlyn that turned it on would see that. Polar users, it was kind of hard to put a post-ethnotic message in a satellite image. But when I look back on it, we got on the order of a couple hundred, I think, comments into the FCC website. And you compare that with the, I think it was tens of millions of comments they got over the rulemaking on net neutrality. So somebody noticed how to get the job done communicating and we didn't do so well the first time. Take advantage of the fact that I have a live at Caledonia since I'm here, well, my question is, can you talk about the level of awareness of users, of other users around the world, including customers that are already using the products? I would assume that some of them don't know how dependent they are on these data. Yeah, what we have done is while the loss of certain products could impact perhaps the accuracy or quality of some of what we do, generally the products are transparent and the users are transparent to that. If we were suffering a major loss of something, we would notify people that potentially could impact the quality or accuracy of what they get. But as a general rule, I don't think people, very many people are aware of that. I think someone had mentioned the various models, the European model and how people are now aware of that, but it has taken many, many people in many TV meteorologists and others years to, before people probably recognized that and I suspect that as reasonably whether aware people, we probably think a lot more people recognize those than really do. Yeah, I, John, my memory, I came across the AMS conference I think in about 2011 and just when all of the spectrum stuff was beginning to happen and I sat in on a presentation from the vice president from the weather channel and you can still find at least the audio of the presentation and she was talking about how their outreach to the public had changed over the years and what they were doing as a company to get ready for the smartphone era and I'm sure you guys at Accu went and probably had the same conversations, but they, in the private sector, they can do things that we can't do in the government like keep persistent cookies and know who logs on to your site and I remember her saying that, well, people don't watch the weather channel anymore on television, they don't sit down and watch the weather so that's why even back then they were talking about going to more series and then she said that we now understand that people aren't gonna sit at home on their desktop and look at weather.com, they're gonna look at their smartphones so they had reached that understanding four or five years ago and then she also said that they had collected enough data to know that the average amount of time that people were on their weather app was about a minute and a half and she said we're convinced it's people just checking the weather before they head out in the morning trying to decide whether they need to bring an umbrella so when you get into the models and the soundings and all of that stuff that really good intense meteorology and science that goes into producing that decision to take an umbrella yeah, I think that's part of the understanding too and I think in a lot of ways we're victims of our own success yeah, I think we've found the same thing sure we have a number of people, thousands and in some cases millions who send us tweets and get all our tweets and communicate very actively but the vast majority of people just wanna know hey, should I wear a coat to work today? Is my game gonna get rained out on Saturday and am I gonna get killed by a tornado tomorrow so I better find a place to hide? They wanna know how it impacts them and most people also, unless it has a major impact it's hard to get them to take action so I think what we really need if we want that impact is a multi-cure approach organizations like the AMS and the AWCIA do have various relationships and sometimes have things like government days where they speak with legislators and others and explain from our perspective what's needed. There are groups that put together numbers for example, while the federal government may be able to get however many billions of dollars from auctioning this spectrum I wonder what kind of study we could put together that would show here is the impact it will have on forecast and warning quality here's the impact that deterioration will have on public safety, on the economy, on business, on infrastructure but again it's also, it's great to say hey, if I sell this I get 2.4 billion in cash tomorrow and maybe that storm will miss everyone anyway. Yeah, show back a little bit to your, thank you. International question, one example in this band the emergency managers, whether information network is often the only source of tsunami warning to many island entities, both states and protectors and although the spectrum issue today in the 1675 to 1695 measures is so many of the US domestic issue there are many that depend upon direct broadcast as well as in when all throughout the Americas I think it probably goes about saying that although almost all the member nations in the world of the ideological organization offer forecasts and have satellite images on their pages, I think there's something like about eight countries and our entities that actually fly and operate weather satellites around the world and all that data is freely shared and although our infrastructure here I think that's fairly sophisticated that may not always be the case in some of the other countries that you may be requiring about. Yeah, we just add to what Dave said that my experience has been that dealing in both the weather satellite world as well as the spectrum world both domestically and around the world there's very few times if at all where those two communities actually talk to each other and there's great organizations that deal with work, weather satellite problems like the CGMS the coordination group on meteorological satellites there are great groups of people both domestically and internationally that work satellite spectrum issues for weather satellites and other types of science satellites and I know the only way that CGMS finds out about spectrum issues is I get to write a paper every year and you'd be surprised how many times that for example weather satellite person from another country or another agency will talk about the spectrum issue and then I'll say, well, here's your spectrum representative to this international group and I have to pull out main contact information and they say, oh yeah, he works right down the hall for me at the same agency and so I mean, just getting the satellite and the spectrum groups together to talk about these common issues I think go a long way. To the point of engaging our users and trying to get them to be spokesman for protecting the sharing or the impact that frequency sharing might have I was just thinking it's somewhat analogous to the aircraft accident that just happened in France where that condition apparently existed for a long time before something happened that traumatized the impact of not having two pilots or two people in a cockpit I draw the same sort of analogy to this condition we could probably operate for some period of time under frequency interference and the public would see really no impact it's those rare occasions that's why the rare occasions that would only happen if you had our primary communications break down at the same time you had a critical time dependent event happening that would bring that to light and so it's really hard to sell that. Richard Otters from Stellar Solutions I wanted to see if you could expand on the international impact are there lessons learned that we can gain from other countries, other regions that dealt with the spectrum density issues and sharing and so on especially from the Far East perhaps or Europe? Richard, there are a number of technical factors and each case is probably a little bit different. I believe that many people's concept of spectrum sharing and interference radiation may differ depending on whether you are a terrestrial operator and you're trying to keep your signal from interfering maybe with something else that's similar to strength that's on an adjacent channel versus a satellite operated like thinking maybe I'm getting interference to a transplant in the space or I'm having problems helping into the tent all the specifics are a bit different and the other thing that complicates this problem a little bit is the laws of electromagnetic and the propagation and prediction capabilities differ greatly and you can pick different commonly accepted and engineering terms of propagation models and get widely different answers as to how close a particular strong signal has to be before it's going to cause harm to your receiving system and receiving system of course is the RF or analog front end with amplifiers and the antenna and most components and then pretty much everything else behind that these days are digital and so there's a range of which it functions properly and there's a correction capability often built into that that can fix problems only up to a point. I don't know that I can contrast Richard internationally but I can give you a similar example if you have satellite television and you have an extreme rain event or a serious snowstorm you know you're watching a signal and then all of a sudden it starts to pixelate you see some splotches in it that's because the digital correction can't keep up with the interference and pretty soon boom it's gone and you get to look at the screen and it says I'm sorry your service doesn't work I'm afraid in digital systems it's not so much degrading it's at what point does it just clean go away and I think that's the factor here that you'd like users not to have to discover after the spectrum has been sold after someone installs something it's the investment in both the spectrum and the infrastructure is waiting and it doesn't work there's a very similar situation that has occurred recently between the electronic news gatherers and the LTE signals in downtown New York City was something that they've been working on because one of the electronic news gathering channels is very close to one of the new services and it's positive they're receiving channels such that after they try to work together I believe there was a fairly detailed legal file in the last few weeks from their law firm from WNBC into the SEC to try to resolve the issue so there's just a lot of aspects and there's problems and there's probably no simple one answer Thank you again for raising a question of my mind and I forget it's fairly simplistic does the ICD's government have a definition of whatever the evidence is? Or is it just me shaking my head yes Yeah and Dave will have to help me it's 10, well they define harmful interference so 10 dB above the noise threshold is that right? I'm not sure it's the best of my knowledge that there's a legal definition of harmful interference Yeah the 10 dB is the point of which you can tell somebody to shut down who you think is interfering if you can find them but what catches me about that term is harmful interference it doesn't mean no interference so there are times when you can get interfered with by someone else operating according to their license and it just happens and I'll cite one example that I still haven't figured out I live about four miles from the Leesburg Airport and every Saturday morning about 8.30 or so if we're still kind of hanging around and we have WTOP on there's some general aviation pilot that I hear him calling the tower over WTOP and that certainly isn't in-band interference so there's some sort of harmonic or some sort of atmosphere propagation that causes that interference and the important thing is is that I know it happens about 8.30 every morning so I can play around with it if I'm home at 8.30 I'm Mangesh Sannala from the Embassy of India I represent Indian Space Research Organization my question is I come to the question later we saw that unfortunately the center of focus on the frequency for both the broadband users the other broadband users versus the satellite, weather satellite users coincides and given the money involved and perhaps more and more applications going to be built on broadband we don't see in the near future that the center of focus for the other broadband users is shooting from there so my question is whether we have given a thought of coming with the satellite to use frequencies other than this frequency is there a way of us going away from that rather than expecting them not to approach you to already well I think I had mentioned about how long it takes to design and build the satellite system so if you use the timeline of the last goes are reaches its end of mission at around 2040 that means you need to start designing the son or daughter goes are sometime in the late 2020s so in the late 2020s you need to make a prediction on what the broadband industry is going to look like in 2040 and I mean I'm not sure I even know what the broadband industry is going to look like next week and when I made the comment earlier that they changed a lot more quickly it's basically I think a losing battle just to keep up and since at 2040 it's just a deployment you really need to predict that through 2006 at least yeah that's right because we'll be stuck again with how many fault tell I work at Lockheed Mark IV 8 but of course not only the Air Force but also other branches of the military as well so we have sites not only domestic but also international that support geostationary and for aerological so most of those are all banned a lot of them you know the geostationary but we went through the hole when they were sawing off the spectrum for the fullers filling out all the data they required stressing how it's going to impact us since that time you know magically all of a sudden we're seeing pretty much all of our sites professionally nailed and I guess I just wanted to stress you know some of the geostationary we're ramping up now for good as are and obviously when our concern is there it's the hardware that will go from space to impact it the same way it will be impacted right now we're seeing very poor data not locking on past this