The severe disruption to commercial air traffic caused by travel bans and national lockdowns imposed by countries to counter the Covid-19 pandemic has had an unexpected side-effect: a decline in the accuracy of weather forecasts. It is not generally realised that airliners collect and relay data on air pressure, air temperature, relative humidity and wind as the fly their routes, amounting to some 700 000 meteorological reports very day. Meteorological agencies then feed this data into their weather forecasts. But the grounding of so many airliners due to Covid-19 resulted in the loss of 50% to 75% of aircraft weather observations, worldwide, in the period from March to May this year. This has been revealed by a new study published in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters. The loss of this data reduced the accuracy of weather forecasts and, the longer the term of the forecasts, the greater the inaccuracies became.
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