Identification, Impacts and Resolution of Radio Frequency Interference to a GOES Rebroadcast Receiver

On 3 August 2022 the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) first observed degraded performance at its primary Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) Rebroadcast (GRB) earth station located at the Canadian Meteorological Centre (CMC) in Dorval, Québec, which was eventually attributed to radio frequency interference (RFI). This incident led to significant degradation of the quality and completeness of GRB data received at CMC from the GOES-East satellite, which lasted for several months. This presentation will describe the steps taken to identify RFI as the root cause of the degraded performance, outline the steps taken to successfully identify the source of RFI and resolve the incident, and describe the impacts of this incident on MSC operations. Fortunately, the impacts of this RFI event were minimal as the MSC has geographically separated back-up GRB earth stations for each of the GOES-East and GOES-West satellites. As a result, the provision of degraded data to clients was limited to a few hours on August 3 while operational systems were transitioned from the MSC’s primary GOES-East GRB antenna to its back-up antenna. However, for the duration of this incident, there was a loss of resiliency and redundancy in the MSC’s GRB reception network. This incident highlights the importance of having multiple layers of resiliency and redundancy in meteorological satellite data reception systems that provide mission critical near-real time data for weather forecasting and numerical weather and environmental prediction applications. The lessons learned and expertise developed over the course of resolving this RFI incident are expected to pay dividends if/when the MSC next experiences RFI. It is hoped that this presentation will provide useful guidance to other organizations that currently have limited in-house capacity, expertise and experience to identify and resolve RFI. Finally, the MSC recognizes that there are increasing threats to radio spectrum used for weather, water and climate applications due to the rapidly increasing demand for radio spectrum for broadband terrestrial and satellite based commercial radiocommunication services. The MSC therefore encourages other national meteorological and hydrological services (and other science and environmental stakeholders) that are not currently participating in spectrum management activities to become active in domestic, regional and international spectrum management processes to support efforts to preserve and ensure continued access to frequency bands used for meteorological and hydrological applications.