Automated Airport Weather Station - Limitations Requiring Human Augmentation

Limitations Requiring Human Augmentation

At present, automated airport weather stations are unable to report a variety of meteorological conditions. These include:

• shallow or patchy fog
• blowing dust
• smoke
• falling ash
• volcanic eruptions
• tornadoes
• precipitation that is not in the form of rain or snow, such as hail, ice pellets and snow grains
• multiple forms of precipitation falling at the same time
• depth of new snowfall
• total snow depth
• in-cloud and cloud-to-cloud lightning
• clouds that are not directly above the station
• clouds that are more than twelve thousand feet above ground level
• cloud type

Because many of these can pose dangers to aircraft and all of these are of interest to the meteorological community, most of the busier airports also have part-time or full-time human observers who augment, or provide additional information to, the automated airport weather station's observations. Research is on-going to allow the automated stations to detect many of these phenomena.

Automated stations can also suffer from mechanical breakdown, requiring repair or replacement. This can be either due to physical damage (either natural or human caused), mechanical wear, or severe icing during winter weather. During system outages, human observers are often required to supplement missing or non-representative observations from the automated station. Research is also ongoing to produce more robust systems which are less vulnerable to natural damage, mechanical wear and icing.