World Meteorological Organization
30 min ·
TAKE TWO
Some parts of the observing system are already affected. Most notably the significant decrease in air traffic has had a clear impact. In-flight measurements of ambient temperature and wind speed and direction are a very important source of information for both weather prediction and climate monitoring.
Commercial airliners contribute to the Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay programme (AMDAR), which uses onboard sensors, computers and communications systems to collect, process, format and transmit meteorological observations to ground stations via satellite or radio links.
In some parts of the world, in particular over Europe, the decrease in the number of measurements over the last couple of weeks has been dramatic. (see chart below provided by EUMETNET).
The AMDAR observing system has traditionally produced over 700 000 high-quality observations per day of air temperature and wind speed and direction, together with the required positional and temporal information, and with an increasing number of humidity and turbulence measurements being made.