MiRadOr Test campaign - Forecasts
What are we looking for?
With only a few days to go before the first balloons take flights, we thought that this is a good opportunity to discuss our plans.
Radiosondes are a very old technology, but were quick to take off. The first pseudo-radiosonde were experiments in the 1920s and 1930s, with first practical launch achieved by meteorologist Pavel Mochanov. In Europe, the first radiosonde flight in occurred 1931, thanks to the experiments of Prof. Vilho Väisälä. Väisälä would continue to improve on the design and standardized them for commercial usage. In doing so he founded the meteorological equipment manufacturing company that bears his name, Vaisala, the name of the company on our Radiosondes!
So, what can one learn from a 100-year old technology? Quite a lot, actually. Since the 1940s, operational weather centres all over the world have released daily, or near daily, radiosondes as a part of their efforts to get high-quality observations of the atmospheres. These observations are an essential part of modern weather forecasting, being assimilated into NWP models. Having such a long record of these observations is also essential as a record of the climate.
While only providing a snapshot of the atmosphere at a given time and place, radiosondes, as such an established and trusted technology, are also a ‘gold standard’ for validating newer technologies such as satellites or ground-based systems like microwave radiometers (MWR).
Forecasts and Soundings
In northern Germany, we are looking to probe interesting weather systems as they pass by our location. While there is generally no shortage of weather events which are scientifically interesting for us, it is still important to get the timings right for launching our balloons.
That’s where our forecasting experts at Heidelberg University come in. There are a couple of different weather forecast models from around Europe that that our experts use: ICON, IFS, ARPEGE, etc. Here, we show the pan-European Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Services (CAMS) model, which allows us to assess atmospheric composition and provides us with consistent, accurate and global weather forecasts.
CAMS can provide us with information of coming events, such as approaching cold fronts, as shown in the plots below.
We can verify this information by looking at publicly available data from monitoring stations, such as the MWR located at the Dutch meteorological service’s Cabauw site.
But that is not all, with our forecasting method we can predict with some confident the on-set of other interesting phenomena: for example, low-level jets. What we will get to see is not up to us, but we will certainly be ready when they arrive!
Planning and updates
Each day we plan to schedule a call between our in-field experts and those making our forecasts. The idea is to look ahead 2-3 days, as well as to get an update on what is happening tomorrow. Forecasts become more accurate the close to the present they are and so we need to be ready to change up our plans at short notice. Or maybe to just to get ready to put on a raincoat.