It will be interesting to see what impact the satellite Aeolus will have on model accuracy, assuming it will launch: Originally Posted by: Twister
">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38656962
Thanks for that. Let's hope the boffins do manage to solve the laser problems.
Interesting that they single out the tropics as the area where we lack initial data. We (or at least I) always assume that the the poles are potentially problematic in this respect, owing to the low number of data points due to lack of human habitation. But of course an area such as the tropical Pacific is way larger and even more sparsely populated.
And when you think about it, it's the tropics where weather "begins", as storm clouds build and warmth is transported to the poles. I guess it would take about a week for those systems to reach our latitudes and start impacting our weather, and a week is about the point at which model output accuracy falls off a cliff.
If they really have found a way to measure tropical air movements by satellite, then this could be a game changer in terms of turning Fantasy Island into reality. We might get a clue from the ensembles, if this gets launched and they suddenly start showing less scatter than usual.
2 miles west of Taunton, 32 m asl, where "milder air moving in from the west" becomes SNOWMAGEDDON.
Well, two or three times a decade it does, anyway.