MADIS WISDOM Balloon Wind Observations

The Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) developed by the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) collects, integrates, quality controls, and distributes observations from NOAA and non-NOAA organizations. The WISDOM program aims to improve the hurricane track prediction in the 3 to 7 day period before landfall by providing wind and atmospheric data in areas of the Atlantic basin that are poorly observed. NOAA, with major funding support from the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, conducted a successful initial feasibility test during the 2008 hurricane season with balloons reporting wind data in near real-time. WISDOM conducted a Proof of Concept in 2009 to determine the long term hurricane track forecast improvements achieved by ingesting WISDOM data into global forecast models. The WISDOM system is designed around the availability of small super-pressure balloons, and the availability of small (100 gram) electronics which include over the horizon Global Positioning System and satellite radio communications capabilities. The concept is that large numbers of WISDOM balloons with the GPS payload are released to optimize weather prediction at a future time for phenomena of interest. Advanced techniques of assimilation and modeling are used to determine the release locations of the balloons to optimize their trajectories to improve future numerical weather prediction. MADIS subscribers have access to an integrated, reliable and easy-to-use database containing the real-time and archived observational datasets, including the WISDOM balloon winds. Quality Control (QC) of MADIS observations is also provided, since considerable evidence exists that the retention of erroneous data, or the rejection of too many good data, can substantially distort forecast products. Observations in the ESRL/GSD database are stored with a series of flags indicating the quality of the observation from a variety of perspectives (e.g. temporal consistency and spatial consistency), or more precisely, a series of flags indicating the results of various QC checks. Users of MADIS can then inspect the flags and decide whether or not to ingest the observation. MADIS also includes an Application Program Interface (API) that provides users with easy access to the observations and quality control information. The API allows each user to specify station and observation types, as well as QC choices, and domain and time boundaries. Data from only a few flights are available from MADIS.