HN Reader

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.

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...

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Clever idea! Well done

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

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.

This is cool as hell.

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

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

See also https://erichorvitz.com/planesenors.pdf and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/windflow/

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!