[Editors] MIT: future of weather forecasting

[Elizabeth Thomson]

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Developing a better flight plan for weather forecasting

--Flying robots could give people more time to prepare for the worst
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For Immediate Release
THURSDAY, DEC. 11, 2008

Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
E: thomson at mit.edu, T: 617-258-5402


CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--At MIT, planning for bad weather involves far more  
than remembering an umbrella. Researchers in the Department of  
Aeronautics and Astronautics are trying to improve weather forecasting  
using robotic aircraft and advanced flight plans that consider  
millions of variables.

“Weather affects huge sectors of our economy, such as agriculture and  
transportation,” said Nicholas Roy, an assistant professor and one of  
the researchers who worked on the project. With more time for advanced  
planning, farmers could bring in their crop before a big storm hits.  
Airlines could adjust their flight schedules further in advance,  
reducing the impact on customers.

Improving weather forecasting could also save lives. “People do get  
killed in these storms,” said Aero-Astro Professor Jonathan How, the  
principal investigator. The more time to prepare for a storm and  
evacuate the area, the better. Currently, forecasts made more than 48  
hours in the future aren’t considered highly reliable.

The researchers hope to gain some lead-time by improving the way data  
about current weather conditions are collected. Existing forecasting  
systems depend on pressure, temperature, and other sensors aboard a  
single piloted airplane that flies scripted routes. But the data that  
are collected can’t be processed fast enough to alter the flight plan  
if a storm starts brewing. “The response time is fairly slow,” How  
said. “Today’s flight path is based on yesterday’s weather.”

Ideally, teams of unmanned aircraft would be used to gather data.  
Current sensor readings from one plane would be used to guide the  
deployment of additional planes to areas with especially interesting  
or changing weather. By gathering information from several key areas  
at the same time, the researchers believe they could offer more  
accurate forecasts.

“We’d like to better predict the weather three to five days in  
advance,” said Han-Lim Choi, a postdoctoral associate in How’s lab.

But this is no easy task, largely because weather involves extremely  
complicated interactions between a lot of different factors. And while  
the researchers focused their work on the area over the Pacific Ocean,  
this was still a vast expanse to consider in terms of automated flight  
planning. Traditional robotic planning algorithms don’t scale well to  
problems of that size, How explained. So the key challenge was  
creating an algorithm that could develop an effective flight plan  
quickly, based on millions of variables.

After three years of research using computerized weather simulations,  
the team believes their algorithm can quickly and efficiently  
determine where aircraft should be sent to take the most important  
measurements. Essentially, the algorithm works by determining the  
relative utility of taking different flight paths to gather  
measurements. How said their system can create a new flight plan  
within six hours of collecting data.

Choi, who recently earned an MIT PhD for his work on the project, will  
describe the research at this month’s IEEE Conference on Decision and  
Control.

How said the results of the research could reach far beyond weather  
prediction. Intelligent path planning is essential for all kinds of  
mobile robots, be they autonomous cars or mail-carrying robots. The  
research also be used, How noted, to help environmental engineers  
determine where best to take samples to determine the source of a  
contaminant.

Although the system has not yet been used with real aircraft, How’s  
team continues to test their algorithm against increasingly complex  
weather models with the help of former MIT meteorologist James Hansen,  
who is now with the Naval Research Laboratory.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

--END--

Written by Rachel Kremen, MIT News Office correspondent (Additional  
reporting and writing by Elizabeth Thomson, MIT News Office)



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