Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Aircraft Meteorological Data Reports

For the eyes of aviators only, others enter here at your own risk :-) ....AMDAR (Aircraft Meteorological Data Reports) is really neat. Some airlines participate in putting a small data gathering device on their aircraft. As the aircraft ascends/descends, a broadcast wind direction, gusts, temperature and more (http://amdar.noaa.gov/FAQ.html gives detail) is sent to a data gathering agency. One of the more important factors transmitted is moisture content. Currently, around 140,000 samples are collected/day. This means wx folks and aviators have access to almost real time radiosonde-like sounding data. One example using this data can be found at http://rucsoundings.noaa.gov/. "RUC" stands for rapid update cycle. If you are not familiar with the display format, take the Texas A & M tutorial (link on bottom of rucsoundings page). The format is a log-p skew-t graph, something that weather experts have been using for years. However, the Java version of this graph allows you to get dew points, temperatures, wind velocity and direction, etc. in the atmosphere over the airport you selected and up to about FL400. You can also lift a hypothetical air parcel to see if it is stable or results in bad things. It's easy to find freezing levels, saturation altitudes (where clouds are liable to form, etc.). Nice stuff for aviators. Even if you only use it in a basic way.

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