COVID-19 Pandemic Imperils Weather Forecast.

Ying Chen

doi:10.1029/2020gl088613

Abstract

Weather forecasts play essential parts in economic activity. Assimilation of meteorological observations from aircraft improves forecasts greatly. However, global lockdown during the COVID‐19 pandemic (March to May 2020) has eliminated 50‐75% aircraft observations and imperiled weather forecasting. Here, we verify global forecasts against reanalysis to quantify the impact of the pandemic. We find a large deterioration in forecasts of surface meteorology over regions with busy air flights, such as North America, southeast China, and Australia. Forecasts over remote regions are also substantially worse during March to May 2020 than 2017–2019, and the deterioration increases for longer‐term forecasts. This could handicap early warning of extreme weather and cause additional economic damage on the top of that from the pandemic. The impact over Western Europe is buffered by the high density of conventional observations, suggesting that introduction of new observations in data‐sparse regions would be needed to minimize the impact of global emergencies on weather forecasts.

Highlights

Weather forecasts play an essential part in daily life [Böcker et al, 2013], agriculture [Calanca et al, 2010] and industrial activities [Teisberg et al, 2005], and have great economic value [Zhu et al, 2002]
We demonstrate the reduction of forecast accuracy in temperature, relative humidity (RH), wind speed and pressure with a special focus on temperature, because temperature is widely observed by commercial airlines with high quality and assimilated in the Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS) [Petersen, 2016]
Weather forecasts play an essential part in daily life, agriculture and industrial activities, and their accuracy is largely dependent on the amount of meteorological observations assimilated in forecast models

Summary

Introduction

Weather forecasts play an essential part in daily life [Böcker et al, 2013], agriculture [Calanca et al, 2010] and industrial activities [Teisberg et al, 2005], and have great economic value [Zhu et al, 2002]. Assimilation of aircraft observations exerts the largest improvements in global weather forecasts compared with each individual category of conventional observations (exclude satellite), both for long-term average and for individual events [Ota et al, 2013; Petersen, 2016]. Availability of these critical aircraft observations has reduced remarkably since March 2020, resulting from the global lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization, by the end of March 2020, more than 20 commercial airlines have stopped flights entirely and about 12 airlines stopped all international flights.

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Results

Conclusion