Automated Weather Reports From Aircraft: Tamdar and The U.S. Amdar Fleet

Abstract

AMDAR (Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay) is a worldwide program providing automated real-time reports of atmospheric conditions from commercial airliners. AMDAR data have been available, and used by weather forecasters and in weather models, for nearly two decades. For a full discussion of AMDAR, particularly its U.S. component, see Moninger et al. (2003). AMDAR has improved weather forecasting, but the data from the commercial jetliners that comprise the bulk of AMDAR-producing aircraft leave data gaps. Over the contiguous United States these gaps are generally below 20,000 ft. between major airline hubs. In an attempt to fill these gaps, the NASA Aviation Safety Program funded the development of a sensor called TAMDAR (Tropospheric AMDAR) by AirDat, LLC, of Raleigh NC, designed for deployment on aircraft flown by regional airlines (Daniels et al., 2006). For the past year (15 January 2005 to 15 January 2006), with the support of NASA and the FAA, these sensors have been deployed on 63 aircraft flying over the U. S. Midwest in an experiment called the Great Lakes Fleet Evaluation (GLFE). We report here on the properties of the data compared with traditional AMDAR data, and present a brief overview of some of the results of the analyses of these data. More detailed results will be given in other presentations at this annual meeting.