An image of Earth and the moon taken by the newest satellite in NOAA's GOES series.

When cyclones barrel along the Pacific and tornadoes rage across the Midwest, satellites eye the tempests and send real-time weather data earthward.

But the weather science community is worried they won’t always get those crucial views and other data, because of a proposed auction of one scientific band of the radio spectrum that’s under consideration by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Just a bit of radio interference can throw off calculations used to make accurate weather predictions that are “extremely sensitive” to even small temperature differences, said Jordan Gerth, a researcher at the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Even 2 or 3 degrees can be the difference between a rapidly growing thunderstorm and one that’s not going to pose a threat,” Gerth told BuzzFeed News.

Right now, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) system beams weather images and other information to terrestrial dishes — primarily, to those at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) facility on Wallops Island in Virginia.

Isolated off the state’s Eastern Shore, transmissions to the island usually go off without a hitch. But three times in 2015, portions of photographs of weather events — including Hurricane Patricia, the second-most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded — were blacked out.

Interference in the electromagnetic spectrum — the invisible corridor by which everything from radio broadcasts, to cell phone calls, to television signals are delivered to devices through the US — was the culprit.

“That interference was traced to a commercial operator in an adjacent band,” Mark Paese, deputy assistant administrator for satellite and information services at NOAA, told BuzzFeed News by email.

Scientists studying climate change and other Earth systems rely on these eyes in the sky to do their work. But the community fears interference with satellite signals may get worse.

That’s because a private company called Ligado Networks is seeking permission from the FCC — the federal agency responsible for allotting slices of spectrum — to share the band of radio frequencies that NOAA relies on to communicate with the GOES satellites.

Right now, that band of spectrum acts as a buffer between Ligado’s existing network and channels NOAA uses to retransmit high-resolution satellite images and other data to weather centers around the country.

Protecting those channels is crucial to the transmission of weather observations to not only NOAA itself, warn experts, but also to dozens of private firms and academic institutions, like the University of Wisconsin.

“We need to be able to get the data in the timely matter,” Gerth said.

But the company pushing the proposal argues that its plan, instead of interfering with the delivery of weather information, will actually help get that data to thousands of other scientists who currently don’t have access to it.

Or, in the words of Reed Hundt, a former chairman of the FCC appointed by President Bill Clinton and a member of Ligado’s board of directors, “Ligado is going to democratize weather information.”

