The COVID-19 pandemic has eliminated up to 75 percent of aircraft-based weather observations and reduced the accuracy of weather forecasting, especially in busy air traffic sectors in North America, southeastern China and Australia, according to a U.K. study.1
The deterioration of forecast quality could hinder development of early warnings of extreme weather, said a report on the study, part of a collection of COVID-19 reports published online by the American Geophysical Union and intended for publication in the organization’s Geophysical Research Letters journal.
“Weather forecasts play an essential part in daily life, agriculture and industrial activities, and have great economic value,” the report said. “The accuracy of forecasts is largely dependent on the quality of initial conditions used in numerical weather prediction models.”
The number of weather observations has increased steadily in recent decades, in large part because of observations…
