Technology Area

Weather forecast may not have the best reputation for accuracy, but the technology today, perhaps to make reliable weather predictions up to 48 hours.

The researchers at MIT, however, believe that the aircraft storm-autonomous intelligent algorithms running to catch that number to four days.

Weather forecast better able to help farmers and the transportation authority with the planning and even save lives by providing earlier warning of storms and bad weather, said Jonathan How, chief researcher at MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Long-term prediction is not necessarily wrong because of forecasting models, but rather because the initial conditions are not accurately measured, says Martin Ralph, mereorologi researcher at the National Oceanic and Administration atmosefer earth laboratoriuun system, in Boulder, CO as inaccuracies come from gaps in the data, he said.

Ground-based sensors have been used to record temperature, wind speed, humidity, air density, and rainfall, but they only measure the conditions on the ground, said How.

At sea, where a lot of bad weather comes.

Satellite observations help to build up a picture, but the satellite is blind to certain kinds of useful data, such as wind speed and atmospheric boundary conditions, said Ralph.

To get the most accurate forecast, you really want to get the sensors to the weather itself, but how?

In theory, weather balloons can do this, but only if they happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Thus, the weather service currently trying to track weather systems are driven using aircraft flying the route is determined, taking measurements along the road.

Logistics of deploying these aircraft so complicated, however, that it is difficult to change their routes in response to changing weather conditions.

As a result, says How, there has been much interest in using unmanned air vehicles, or UAVs, instead. The idea is that there will be a constant number of UAVs in the air, continue to work together to position themselves in what would collectively be the most useful locations.

The problem, says How, is that counted the most useful sites is a very complex task.

Analyzing involving more than one million data stating the location of hundreds of thousands of sensors, and uses this data to predict weather conditions six to eight hours from now.

But that challenge is handled MIT researchers.