Get the latest tech news
Weather Model based on ADS-B
Each second thousands of planes send messages about their location and flight data - in ADS-B messages. These are intended to prevent mid-air collisions, but we can exploit the aggregated data to map out atmospheric conditions. By deriving the wind speed from the broadcast flight data, we can model wind speed and direction.
By aggregating and processing the messages about position and heading, we can build a very crude meteorological model! Again, all credit goes to the authors of the paper, I only wrote some plumbing code to wrangle the data into a usable format and added some features to the visualisation for this blog post. You can recognise the same high-speed winds over the Mediterranean (from Greece to Turkey), where the speed even matches up quite closely - our model predicting 50 m/s and the reference showing 152 km/h.
Or read this on Hacker News