Aircraft flying over tropical oceans could significantly improve the accuracy of storm forecasts by making high-resolution atmospheric measurements.

Jennifer Haase at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and her team developed an airborne Global Positioning System device, which uses radio signals to sense and precisely locate atmospheric conditions. In 2010, during research flights into the storm cell over the Caribbean Sea that developed into Hurricane Karl, the team found that their system agreed with data from spaceborne systems, and it increased the number of atmospheric profiles taken in the storm region by more than 50%. If deployed on commercial aircraft, the technique could produce huge amounts of data for use in meteorology, the authors note.

Geophys. Res. Lett. http://doi.org/rzd (2014)