Can aircraft weather data fill coverage gaps?

[knocker]

ECMWF has started to use newly available aircraft observations of humidity, temperature and wind to help initialise its forecasts.

The data come from the WMO’s Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay (AMDAR) programme.

Some of them cover parts of the globe, such as Africa, the Caribbean and ocean areas, where the observation network is relatively sparse, making them very useful to ECMWF.

http://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2016/can-aircraft-weather-data-fill-coverage-gaps

[Paul]

Sounds similar to what Panasonic were talking about with their new weather model?

http://panasonic.aero/News/Articles/PanasonicWeatherSolutionsIntroducesPanasonicG.aspx

[knocker]

Yes Ryan Maue tweeted this."Remember Panasonic's new model using aircraft data within a GFS-4D EnVar system?

[knocker]

Can space tech help measure the weather?

Quote

This summer the Met Office was able to take advantage of a nanosatellite being used as a technology demonstrator by the European Space Agency (ESA) to gather weather information. The satellite, GomX-3, was built by the Danish CubeSat developer GomSpace. Using technology not tested in this way before, our scientists were able to use this satellite to gather wind and temperature observations over a large part of the globe.

The data was collected from messages sent routinely from aircraft back to Air Traffic Control. This experiment has proven that by exploiting existing technology in new ways it is possible to obtain weather data for locations which may be data sparse. In the future this data could be fed into numerical weather models to help improve the accuracy of weather forecasts.

https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2016/11/30/can-space-tech-help-measure-the-weather/

[Hanny]

Don't see why not, military have used Met flights for years, although this make funny reading Military accused of changing weather!