But pilots really care about wind shear. Its the thing that makes people suddenly hit the overhead compartment. It typically requires flight crews reporting it to ATC over radio. Improving accuracy of local wind events is very valuable.
Nope, it’s mostly selective lack of reading skills when it comes to the ‘fasten the seatbelts’ sign..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAMDAR
Observations definitely fell off a cliff as commercial air travel slowed to a crawl. In terms of impact, though… it turned out not to be a big deal.
> Aircraft reports suffered a 75% decline in numbers from mid-March to mid-April 2020; in May the number started increasing again. Despite the loss of data there is no clear signal in the forecast skill—partly because the skill shows considerable variability on daily, seasonal, and interannual timescales (Figures 3 and 4). …
> …
> Overall, we can find no evidence that the decrease in aircraft observations has handicapped numerical forecasts of extreme weather to an extent large enough to incur significant economic impact.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
Thanks!
I hope that data's available publicly, though likely not as publicly as ADSB broadcasts.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/5g-wireless-could...
The article predates our current reality where C-band (3.5GHz) is available for 5G
Maybe I missed it but I didn’t quite follow why you needed to buy an adsb receiver if adsb exchange is already aggregating all the data
Determining what benefit this gives the operator is left as an exercise for the reader.
But your own receiver will always cover your area.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...
The weather model from PWS was incredible, using TAMDAR sensors mounted on commercial aircraft, which recorded data at multiple altitudes getting a great sample of conditions from many layers of the atmosphere as aircraft ascend and descend.
IIRC, during hurricane season some years ago, the PWS model outperformed hurricane path predictions from many other organizations in terms of accuracy, among other things.
I love this share too, and I suspect this weather data could be very useful!
[2] https://flyht.com/investors/news-and-media/view/flyht-acquir...
It's not clear to me that they even still sell the weather service itself. They do sell the sensors, but this feels a little off target as a forum to sell either weather data or sensors for aircraft.
The poster claims no longer to be employed there, and hasn't obviously posted anything else on this topic.
And, well, TAMDAR data itself as used to improve forecasting is of broad interest.
Assume good faith.
I thought the TAMDAR tech reference might be if interest to those following and reading comments here.
I'm not associated with them anymore and I'm not sure how much of their model still exists after the assets were sold to flyht, but I hope it does because we need good weather models!
Fair enough being vigilant, but not an ad.
A few years ago, in the 2017-19 timeframe, android phones had the best "next few hours" weather prediction I've ever seen. It was way more accurate than wunderground, accuweather and all other web services. Sometime after 2019 it seems to have gone, and I wonder what happened.
Speculation: goog used the barometric sensors in many phones "near you" to increase the precision of their models, making "immediate timeframes" extremely precise.
No idea if this actually happened or it was confirmation bias on my part, would love for someone with knowledge to chime in. I also wonder why they stopped, if my speculation is correct. Data gathering stuff, perhaps?
They didn't.
Smartphone pressure observations (SPO) have extremely limited use in real-world meteorology for a whole variety of reasons. First and foremost - to actually use them, you have to assimilate them into a numerical forecast model. Very few commercial organizations outside of specialty weather companies do this, and fewer still run their own assimilation systems. The most well-known claims about incorporating SPO data into an operational forecasting system come from The Weather Company, but there's limited information in the public domain about what they _actually_ do.
The problem is that we know there are big problems with SPO data. Cliff Mass had several PhD students in the late 2010's that looked at this in detail (e.g. [1] and [2] are good entrypoints to the body of literature this group produced). The best summary I can offer is that (1) SPO data requires on-device calibration and bias correction otherwise it's relatively unusable in downstream applications; and (2) even when you _do_ incorporate SPO data into high-resolution simulations, they have little to no impact on forecast skill or quality.
There has been some work recently that uses SPO data for post-hoc analysis of weather events (e.g. [3]; IIRC there is a nice Google Research blogpost about this too, but I can't find it immediately). But that's a very different application.
Google likely just worked with a vendor that had nowcasting capability (which was very in vogue due to the popularity of Dark Sky). But all those forecasts are literally just simple extrapolations of radar imagery, and are only useful for precipitation.
[1]: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/wefo/37/5/WAF-D-2... [2]: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/wefo/32/2/waf-d-1... [3]: https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/18/829/2025/
But yeah, it's still not required unless you are flying in rule airspace: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/researc...
touisteur•6mo ago
nickmcc•6mo ago
touisteur•6mo ago