Slump in Air Travel Hindered Weather Forecasting, Study Shows
Government researchers have confirmed that the steep decline in air traffic during the coronavirus pandemic has affected the quality of weather forecasting models by sharply reducing the amount of atmospheric data routinely collected by commercial airliners. From a report: In a study, researchers showed that when a short-term forecasting model received less data on temperature, wind and humidity from aircraft, the forecast skill (the difference between predicted meteorological conditions and what actually occurred) was worse. The researchers and others had suspected this would be the case because atmospheric observations from passenger and cargo flights are among the most important data used in forecasting models. The observations are made by instruments aboard thousands of airliners, mostly based in North America and Europe, as part of a program in place for decades. They are transmitted in real time to forecasting organizations around the world, including the National Weather Service. During the first months of the pandemic, when air traffic declined by 75 percent or more worldwide, the number of observations dropped by about the same percentage. "With every kind of observation that goes into weather models, we know they have some impact on improving accuracy overall," said one of the researchers, Stan Benjamin, a senior scientist at the Global Systems Laboratory, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in Boulder, Colo. "If you've really lost a lot of observations of some kind there could be some stepping back in skill overall." While the researchers showed that the data loss contributed to making the model less accurate, NOAA said that so far it had not seen an impact on the type of short-term forecasts that companies use to make business decisions or a person might use to decide if they need to take an umbrella when going out.
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