The Weather Notebook: Future of Forecasting

Future of Forecasting
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Weather forecasters are used to being asked 'What's the weather going to be like tomorrow?' -- but what about the question: 'What's weather forecasting going to be like tomorrow -- or next year or in the next decade?' The answer, in brief, is: steady improvement, interesting new systems on the horizon, chance of late-day breakthroughs. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook.

An aerosonde balloon run on the summit of Mount Washington, from the mid 1930's.
Mount Washington Observatory Photo Collection
As local weather forecasts become increasingly detailed and site-specific, forecasters are probably going to rely more and more on graphics to paint a vivid, accessible, Web-based picture of what the atmosphere will be doing in your neighborhood over the next 24 hours.

Data collection is also going to get a boost from a couple of nifty new gadgets. 'Drones' -- pilotless aircraft that zip around taking readings at all levels of the atmosphere -- have already been tested successfully and will likely come into routine use sometime soon.

More experimental, but potentially even more useful in filling data voids, are 'sheer directed' balloons. The idea is to release large radio-controlled weather balloons 'upstream' into the upper atmosphere and let them go with the flow of weather. Periodically, the balloons would discharge instrument-bearing missiles known as dropsondes that radio back readings of temperature, humidity, air pressure and wind speed as they parachute down to the surface.

It sounds like science fiction, but who would have predicted in 1940 that satellites, radar and computers would revolutionize forecasting in a single generation?

Thanks to today's writer David Laskin. Thanks also to Subaru and the National Science Foundation.