Aircraft type-specific errors in AMDAR weather reports from commercial aircraft

AMDAR (Aircraft Meteorological DAta Relay) automated weather reports from commercial aircraft provide an increasing amount of input data for numerical weather prediction models. Previous studies have investigated the quality of AMDAR data. Few of these studies, however, have revealed indications of systematic errors dependent upon the aircraft type. Since different airlines use different algorithms to generate AMDAR reports, it has remained unclear whether a dependency on the aircraft type is caused by physical properties of the aircraft or by different data processing algorithms. In the present study, a special AMDAR dataset was used to investigate the physical type-dependent errors of AMDAR reports. This dataset consists of AMDAR measurements by Lufthansa aircraft performing over 300 landings overall at Frankfurt Rhein/Main (EDDF/FRA) on 22 days in 2004. All of this data has been processed by the same software, implying that influences from different processing algorithms should not be expected. From the comparison of single descents to hourly averaged vertical profiles, it is shown that temperature measurements by different aircraft types can have systematic differences of up to 1 K. In contrast, random temperature errors of most types are estimated to be less than 0.3 K. It is demonstrated that systematic deviations in AMDAR wind measurements can be regarded as an error vector, which is fixed to the aircraft reference system. The largest systematic deviations in wind measurements from different aircraft types (more than 0.5 m s(-1)) were found to exist in the longitudinal direction (i.e. parallel to the flight direction). Copyright (c) 2008 Royal Meteorological Society.