Sensors Mounted On Commercial Airliners Networked For Most Accurate Weather Forecasts Ever
AirDat's sensors, currently installed on the nosecones of 160 commercial airplanes, beam real-time atmospheric data to forecasters Last September, five days before Hurricane Ike pulverized the Texas coast, the National Hurricane Center pegged a point near Corpus Christi as the storm’s most likely landfall. Residents of the low-lying region around Galveston, some 250 miles north, breathed a sigh of relief. But then, 20 hours before Ike reached land, it hooked a right turn in the Gulf of Mexico, plowed into Galveston, and buried the city under a deadly storm surge. If only a different prediction had gotten the headlines. The hurricane’s eye made landfall less than 10 miles from the location predicted by AirDat, an eight-person team of private-sector forecasters in Raleigh, North Carolina. AirDat has nailed the path of a number of storms and, as the Atlantic hurricane season hits its peak this month, national weather...