Weather Model based on ADS-B | Hacker News Reader

Weather Model based on ADS-B

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261 pointssurprisetalk44 comments

An interesting anecdote from a past job - Flyht [1] acquired the assets from Panasonic Weather Solutions (PWS) some time ago [2].

The weather model from PWS was incredible, using TAMDAR sensors mounted on commercial aircraft, which recorded data at multiple altitudes getting a great sample of conditions from many layers of the atmosphere as aircraft ascend and descend.

IIRC, during hurricane season some years ago, the PWS model outperformed hurricane path predictions from many other organizations in terms of accuracy, among other things.

I love this share too, and I suspect this weather data could be very useful!

[1] https://flyht.com/

[2] https://flyht.com/investors/news-and-media/view/flyht-acquir...

This is a blatant ad…

Is it, though?

It's not clear to me that they even still sell the weather service itself. They do sell the sensors, but this feels a little off target as a forum to sell either weather data or sensors for aircraft.

The poster claims no longer to be employed there, and hasn't obviously posted anything else on this topic.

And, well, TAMDAR data itself as used to improve forecasting is of broad interest.

Assume good faith.

What is the problem with promoting your service ? Half of YC mantra is about hustling and spamming your company services everywhere, on boards, to other founders who might use the service, to investors, etc

You can talk about your previous work and be happy about sharing it with the world without it being an advertisement.

It wasn't an ad. I used to work for the parent company of PWS years ago, and their weather model was really awesome.

I thought the TAMDAR tech reference might be if interest to those following and reading comments here.

I'm not associated with them anymore and I'm not sure how much of their model still exists after the assets were sold to flyht, but I hope it does because we need good weather models!

Fair enough being vigilant, but not an ad.

Another fun thing to do is to get mode c (barometric altitude) from aircraft transponders (either SSR or Mode-S downlink 5 or 21 - same physical layer as ADS-B just different bitfield header) and compare it to its GNSS altitude (from ADS-B most of the time) from the same aircraft (the Mode S address used as key) and you can build a map of atmospheric pressures.

I think you could also infer storm tracks based on pilot deviations they often make following their on-board radar.

If you're lucky to be in an area where a Mode S radar is requesting BDS4,4 you can gather more (sparse) live meteorological data: wind speed/direction, temperature, air pressure, humidity... haven't seen BDS 4,4 requested in a while but maybe someone will enable it in your area...

I remember that during COVID, the weather forecast got noticeably worse. One of the explanations I read was that, because so many planes were grounded, there was far less data for the models available. I‘m not sure which source that was from, though.

I don’t remember reading that but I had an ADSB receiver prior to COVID and I watched in real time as the aircraft traffic nearly stopped for months using the the data recorded by my receiver and parsed by FlightAware running on my Raspberry Pi 3B+ - as the world shut down.

This was TAMDAR data, which is a self-contained instrument package intended specifically for meteorological observations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAMDAR

Observations definitely fell off a cliff as commercial air travel slowed to a crawl. In terms of impact, though… it turned out not to be a big deal.

> Aircraft reports suffered a 75% decline in numbers from mid-March to mid-April 2020; in May the number started increasing again. Despite the loss of data there is no clear signal in the forecast skill—partly because the skill shows considerable variability on daily, seasonal, and interannual timescales (Figures 3 and 4). …

> …

> Overall, we can find no evidence that the decrease in aircraft observations has handicapped numerical forecasts of extreme weather to an extent large enough to incur significant economic impact.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...

Ah, nice - I learned something new today and ultimately can put that "funfact" to rest.^^

Thanks!

Glad to hear something's being done with the data from the weather radar most commercial jets have. The thought occurred to me about halfway through reading the blogpost.

I hope that data's available publicly, though likely not as publicly as ADSB broadcasts.

Another factor was the rollout of 5G at that same time:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/5g-wireless-could...

It's mostly the US and a few other small markets that even have millimeter wave 5G NR. This is mostly due to the fact that FCC had not wound down analog broadcasts in time, and mmWave/FR2 was the only way to do 5G in the US initially, as lower C-band were not freed up until 2021. Deployments of mmWave exist solely due to the sunk cost of existing equipment and narrow use-cases like stadiums and concerts.

The article predates our current reality where C-band (3.5GHz) is available for 5G

Enough forks of dump1090 that eventually it changed name to... readsb :D Nice new features, but I opened the source tree and most of the original simplicity / understandability of the code is no longer there.

A bit tangential, and speculative anecdote:

A few years ago, in the 2017-19 timeframe, android phones had the best "next few hours" weather prediction I've ever seen. It was way more accurate than wunderground, accuweather and all other web services. Sometime after 2019 it seems to have gone, and I wonder what happened.

Speculation: goog used the barometric sensors in many phones "near you" to increase the precision of their models, making "immediate timeframes" extremely precise.

No idea if this actually happened or it was confirmation bias on my part, would love for someone with knowledge to chime in. I also wonder why they stopped, if my speculation is correct. Data gathering stuff, perhaps?

I used to use a weather app on Android called DarkSky that did a pretty good job with local predictions. Apple bought them out.

You might like MerrySky.net as a free and ad-free web based replacement that you can drop on your homescreen.

> Speculation: goog used the barometric sensors in many phones "near you" to increase the precision of their models, making "immediate timeframes" extremely precise.

They didn't.

Smartphone pressure observations (SPO) have extremely limited use in real-world meteorology for a whole variety of reasons. First and foremost - to actually use them, you have to assimilate them into a numerical forecast model. Very few commercial organizations outside of specialty weather companies do this, and fewer still run their own assimilation systems. The most well-known claims about incorporating SPO data into an operational forecasting system come from The Weather Company, but there's limited information in the public domain about what they _actually_ do.

The problem is that we know there are big problems with SPO data. Cliff Mass had several PhD students in the late 2010's that looked at this in detail (e.g. [1] and [2] are good entrypoints to the body of literature this group produced). The best summary I can offer is that (1) SPO data requires on-device calibration and bias correction otherwise it's relatively unusable in downstream applications; and (2) even when you _do_ incorporate SPO data into high-resolution simulations, they have little to no impact on forecast skill or quality.

There has been some work recently that uses SPO data for post-hoc analysis of weather events (e.g. [3]; IIRC there is a nice Google Research blogpost about this too, but I can't find it immediately). But that's a very different application.

Google likely just worked with a vendor that had nowcasting capability (which was very in vogue due to the popularity of Dark Sky). But all those forecasts are literally just simple extrapolations of radar imagery, and are only useful for precipitation.

[1]: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/wefo/37/5/WAF-D-2... [2]: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/wefo/32/2/waf-d-1... [3]: https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/18/829/2025/

Thank you, for the insights and literature. I appreciate it.

Could the same be done with (marine) AIS?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

* https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home

* https://www.vesselfinder.com

Flight plans are usually filed hours before a flight with old wind data and sometimes can't be changed in congested airspace.

But pilots really care about wind shear. Its the thing that makes people suddenly hit the overhead compartment. It typically requires flight crews reporting it to ATC over radio. Improving accuracy of local wind events is very valuable.

> Its the thing that makes people suddenly hit the overhead compartment.

Nope, it’s mostly selective lack of reading skills when it comes to the ‘fasten the seatbelts’ sign..

Are you actually getting heading (where the nose is pointing), or are you getting something derived from the ground track? Those are different and really critical for backing out the wind. Have been thinking about this because gliders rely on having really accurate heading info to calculate realtime wind - used in the Hawk and LARUS variometers.

Only airliners transmit heading and indicated airspeed, and even then only in certain locations such as Europe. Smaller planes only transmit GPS position/altitude/track/speed and barometric altitude, and in North America you generally only see this as well as the other data isn't required by FAA or Nav Canada as far as I'm aware.

This seems like a very useful weather product to supply to pilots. I wonder if anyone is already doing this? I know for instance Sirius XM weather has winds aloft info, but it’s not all that accurate in my (albeit limited) experience. I think that’s based on forecasts vs real time data though.

Yes, several companies offer sophisticated aviation forecast products, which employ both modeling and observational data to capture 3D areas of turbulence, icing, etc. Similar systems are also run by NOAA and other agencies and their forecasts are disseminated for free, e.g. [1].

[1]: https://aviationweather.gov/wafs/

This is really cool and not what I was expecting. Nice work!

The author states that all planes must have ADS-B, which is not true for most general aviation. It's a smart thing to do, but not required.

GA flights will typically broadcast over 978MHz UAT, and in controlled airspace TIS-B can share context across frequencies.

But yeah, it's still not required unless you are flying in rule airspace: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/researc...

I just want to add - this is exactly why I love HN.

Very cool!

Maybe I missed it but I didn’t quite follow why you needed to buy an adsb receiver if adsb exchange is already aggregating all the data

The receiver gives you realtime data in the immediate vicinity. The exchange gives you slightly older data from everywhere.

Determining what benefit this gives the operator is left as an exercise for the reader.

You're right, but "slightly older" is on the order of seconds.

But only for those areas with receiver coverage that feeds them.

But your own receiver will always cover your area.

Initially I didn't realise historical data was available for free... I was also interested in learning more about the system itself, writing a diy decoder, etc... which is why I bought one. But yeah, kind of lost track of explaining that in the post :)

God I love this, I’ve been nerding out on weather for quite a while now. I need to build this, it looks so fun!

Clever idea! Well done

This is cool as hell.

Ukrainians benefit from this data a bit more than russians do. Our Ukrainian brothers will be on the forefront of so so many things because of this war. So many startups to keep track of! Udachi nashym Ukrayinsʹkym bratam

What do you mean?

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