COVID‐19 Pandemic Imperils Weather Forecast: Weather forecasts play essential parts in economic activity.
Assimilation of meteorological observations from aircraft improves
forecasts greatly. However, global lockdown during the COVID‐19 pandemic
(March to May 2020) has eliminated 50‐75% aircraft observations and
imperiled weather forecasting. Here, we verify global forecasts against
reanalysis to quantify the impact of the pandemic. We find a large
deterioration in forecasts of surface meteorology over regions with busy
air flights, such as North America, southeast China, and Australia.
Forecasts over remote regions are also substantially worse during March
to May 2020 than 2017–2019, and the deterioration increases for
longer‐term forecasts. This could handicap early warning of extreme
weather and cause additional economic damage on the top of that from the
pandemic. The impact over Western Europe is buffered by the high
density of conventional observations, suggesting that introduction of
new observations in data‐sparse regions would be needed to minimize the
impact of global emergencies on weather forecasts.
