tom hanlon
EF2
I have thought that upper atmosphere is key to weather forecasting. I have also understood that we get our upper air data from radiosonde ballons, weather ballons.
How critical is this data to the model runs ? Seems like the radiosonde data is rather sparse compared to the surface data. Is this in an issue or do we look for broad patterns in the upper atmosphere rather than details.
Anyhow why I brought this up is I was wondering what sort of data is collected from commercial flight and if data is not collected and assimilated into the model runs, perhaps it should be.
So my questions are...
Does NOAA or CDC or whoever runs the models gather data from commercial airline flights ? If so do they gather pressure altitude and humidity or anything else ?
If they do not gather this then why not ? Wouldn't the return be worthwhile ? I am not talking about much just some way to get wind speed temp pressure and altitude , longitude, latituderom a the whole flight and download that data on arrival or radio it in during flight.
have you looked at http://flightaware.com/ there are hundreds of planes in the air at all times? The long range flights seem to fly at the 200mb level while shortrange flights get up to the 500 and a bit higher. They certainly pass through a decent slice of the atmosphere. I do not know if gathering wind speed and direction is reasonable from a moving aircraft. Humidity and temp seem easy enough though.
Just curious.
--
Tom Hanlon
How critical is this data to the model runs ? Seems like the radiosonde data is rather sparse compared to the surface data. Is this in an issue or do we look for broad patterns in the upper atmosphere rather than details.
Anyhow why I brought this up is I was wondering what sort of data is collected from commercial flight and if data is not collected and assimilated into the model runs, perhaps it should be.
So my questions are...
Does NOAA or CDC or whoever runs the models gather data from commercial airline flights ? If so do they gather pressure altitude and humidity or anything else ?
If they do not gather this then why not ? Wouldn't the return be worthwhile ? I am not talking about much just some way to get wind speed temp pressure and altitude , longitude, latituderom a the whole flight and download that data on arrival or radio it in during flight.
have you looked at http://flightaware.com/ there are hundreds of planes in the air at all times? The long range flights seem to fly at the 200mb level while shortrange flights get up to the 500 and a bit higher. They certainly pass through a decent slice of the atmosphere. I do not know if gathering wind speed and direction is reasonable from a moving aircraft. Humidity and temp seem easy enough though.
Just curious.
--
Tom Hanlon