A new report raises red flags that the recent falloff in commercial flights degrades meteorologists’ ability to forecast the weather accurately.
The sudden drop in in-flight data could “handicap early warning of extreme weather and cause additional economic damage on the top of that from the pandemic,” the report warns.
“Coronavirus has disrupted our lives in multiple, unexpected ways, and this might be the most unexpected of all,” American Council on Science and Health Vice President of Scientific Communications Alex Berezow told the Washington Examiner.
The paper, “COVID‐19 Pandemic Imperils Weather Forecast,” was peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. It points out that data from commercial flights is a significant contributor to forecasting models that meteorologists use to predict the weather. The recent 50% to 75% drop-off in flights globally didn’t help.
The report was authored by Ying Chen, a climate scientist at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. It found a “large deterioration” for “forecasts of surface meteorology over regions with busy air flights, such as North America, southeast China, and Australia.”
Forecasts for “remote regions” were also “substantially worse” for March through May of this year than they were for those same months over the last three years. Furthermore, Chen found that the “deterioration” of predictive accuracy “increases for longer-term forecasts.”
Some of what the report says is relatively uncontroversial among weather scientists. However, they caution against getting too spun up about early detection of hurricanes, tropical storms, and other extreme weather events.
University of Washington meteorologist Clifford Mass has raised concerns on his website that the falloff in air travel could hurt forecasting. But he said he believes many of the paper’s “findings are questionable,” and he’s particularly unimpressed with the early warning information.
Mass told the Washington Examiner that the danger that fewer flight data poses for early detection of bad storms “is very minor” because, on that front, at least, “satellite data is absolutely dominant.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agreed with Mass about the importance of satellite data in calling out extreme weather.
Spokeswoman Lauren Gaches provided a statement to the Washington Examiner explaining that the agency “is now using COSMIC-2 satellite data further to increase observations throughout the depth of the tropical atmosphere.”
The NOAA admitted that there is a substantial reduction in the information provided by commercial flights but that this hardly amounts to flying blind. It went so far as to argue that this “does not necessarily translate into a reduction in forecast accuracy.”
The NOAA spelled out what the status quo looks like in nonpandemic times: “More than 3,500 commercial aircraft normally provide over 250 million observations per year. Throughout the flight path, from vertical profiles during ascent and descent to cruise-level, these aircraft provide pressure, temperature, wind speed and direction, and in some cases humidity.”
The agency put the best possible face on the state of data: “As of July 14, the daily output of meteorological data from U.S. commercial aircraft is greater than one-third of normal levels.”
Chen disagreed with the rosier parts of that assessment. He told the Washington Examiner, “Aircraft observations are the top three most helpful data set for improving weather forecasts” and pointed to a paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society to back that up.
However, Chen also cautioned against getting too alarmed by his paper’s early warning concern. He said that it is “too early to say” and “difficult to quantify” how degraded prediction models might affect natural disaster preparation. He called not for more action at this time but for more studies to get a better grip on this information problem.
