Moscow Sheremetievo airport weather forecasters learn to use new weather maps, which allow detecting storms more accurately and predicting their duration and place, where a storm will calm down. Flights now will become safer thanks to the automatic system of satellite data analysis, developed by Russian scientists.
      
      Air bumps and vibration – sensations, which are not pleasant at all – seem to be “child’s play”, compared to that, when a plane enters a thunderstorm. Air transportation becomes more intensive each year, and the weather remains far from perfect. Twisters and hurricanes, thunderstorms and heavy rains are of serious hazard to lives of air-travelers. But terrestrial meteorological stations are too random to take a correct view of a situation and to give exact predictions on the plane’s way. That is why weather-predicting experts decipher satellite images of clouds and specify location of atmospheric fronts. Until recently they did that manually and only on the qualitative level, which made weather forecasting dependent on expert’s skills and experience.
      
      Scientists from Science and Research Centre of Space Meteorology “Planet” have developed quantitative methods of cloud images’ processing. Cloud data arrive from radiometers of NOAA-16 polar orbital satellite and METEOSAT-7 geostationary satellite. The automatic complex detects atmospheric phenomena, measures precipitation and thunderstorm intensity, and defines height of the cumulonimbus cloud ceiling and other meteorological parameters. Then it comes out with revised maps of weather forecast.
      
      Moscow Sheremetievo airport weather forecasters analyzed these revised maps and made sure that they correlate well with terrestrial data. Authors of described technique report that new maps, compared to original images, allow much more accurate predictions of wave disturbances’ and atmospheric fronts’ location and dynamics, as well as zones, where rains and thunderstorms are likely to appear. The main concept of the technique was reported during “Challenges of Space-Earth Remote Sensing” conference, which was organized by Russian Academy’s of Sciences Institute for Space Research.
      
      Source: framework of III Open Science Conference "Challenges of Space-Earth Remote SensingChallenges of Space-Earth Remote Sensing" (Moscow, ISP) via Elements.ru