Weather and Sea Intelligence MASINT
The science and art of weather prediction used the ideas of measurement and signatures to predict phenomena, long before there were any electronic sensors. Masters of sailing ships might have no more sophisticated instrument than a wetted finger raised to the wind, and the flapping of sails.
Weather information, in the normal course of military operations, has a major effect on tactics. High winds and low pressures can change artillery trajectories. High and low temperatures cause both people and equipment to require special protection. Aspects of weather, however, also can be measured and compared with signatures, to confirm or reject the findings of other sensors.
The state of the art is to fuse meteorological, oceanographic, and acoustic data in a variety of display modes. Temperature, salinity and sound speed can be displayed horizontally, vertically, or in three-dimensional perspective.
Read more about this topic: Geophysical MASINT
Famous quotes containing the words weather and, weather, sea and/or intelligence:
“Is it possible
That any may find
Within one heart so diverse mind,
To change or turn as weather and wind?
Is it possible?”
—Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?–1542)
“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“People can no more be judged by their looks than the sea can be measured in bushels.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters of opinion, and not fixed by nature.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)