Navy meteorological experts aren’t just trying to get a better weather forecast. “We are trying to fix battlespace awareness for warfare commanders,” said Asya Andrews, the Navy’s chief aerographer’s mate.

As the leading chief petty officer with Strike Group Oceanography Team at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego, Andrews is part of a team working to introduce highly-advanced precision meteorological tools to improve warfighter capability and protect ISR assets.

The team recently unveiled a weather prediction system to improve the National Unified Operational Prediction Capability (NUOPC), which helps to determine weather models for the military. “This should allow us to better identify extreme features, things like severe weather. It also makes the terrain more influential in the model: Mountains act like mountains, instead of like rolling hills. It’s a higher level of precision,” said Kevin LaCroix, weather services technical lead at the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

That higher degree of accuracy doesn’t just tell forecasters the likelihood of rain. It tells military commanders how to make best use of their sensors and other ISR assets, whose function can be disrupted by inclement weather.

“The forecaster can be more confident in telling the commander that an ISR asset placed here will or will not see the target. You can even be proactive: Tell me the places you want to look at, and I’ll tell you where you will be most likely to be able to collect your intel on a given day,” LaCroix said. “If we assume ISR assets are in high demand, this offers us a chance to maximize their use.”

Improved targeting

Climate conditions can wreak havoc on military intel. Understanding the weather in minute and granular detail is a hedge against possible disruption.

“Cloud ceilings play a big role in ISR. For the blue force to have the advantage, if you have a ceiling at 500 feet and a ScanEagle at 1,000 -- that’s not very effective. You need a cloud-free line of site. The same is true for targeting. When we use a UAV to light up a target for a fighter jet, they need that clear line of site,” Andrews said.

Temperature likewise can have an impact on targeting sensors. “What’s the outside temperature versus what’s the temperature of the target? That plays an ISR role as well. If you are trying to target a certain part of a building, not everything holds or releases heat in the same way, so knowing the surrounding temperature is important,” Andrews said. “Which way is the wind blowing? If it’s blowing across cool water before it gets to an area, that is going to impact the electro-optic sensors of a UAV. If you have a cool wind blowing, that target may not show up as well against that background.”

The newly released enhancement, a probabilistic numerical weather prediction system, offers a new way to synthesize data culled from multiple sources. It’s a way of automating the analytic process to get a more accurate picture from a wider range of samples.

“It takes the observations from all these ships, the land stations, the buoys and the air stations, and feeds them into a single model,” Andrews said. “What you get is a forecast from zero to 100 percent on the likelihood of any given weather event occurring. You’ll get readings for wind, pressure, humidity.”

Weather experts draw a distinction between deterministic and probabilistic models.

“Deterministic forecasting can say there is going to be a hurricane here with winds of 50 knots, and then that doesn’t happen. It’s precise, but it’s wrong,” LaCroix said. “The probabilistic model says it will happen sometime during this window, and it will be in this range of strength. We know the real answer will fall in there.”

For ISR purposes, the important point is that the probabilistic model will be more likely to give you a clear head’s up when things are about to take a turn for the worse.

“What this method is really good at is identifying outliers,” LaCroix said. “If you think there is going to be an extreme event, you get some confidence around that. If the weather is going to definitely be different, this model can forecast that.”

Share:
More In IT and Networks