Weather Model based on ADS-B
32 comments
·July 30, 2025touisteur
nickmcc
I think you could also infer storm tracks based on pilot deviations they often make following their on-board radar.
sixdimensional
An interesting anecdote from a past job - Flyht [1] acquired the assets from Panasonic Weather Solutions (PWS) some time ago [2].
The weather model from PWS was incredible, using TAMDAR sensors mounted on commercial aircraft, which recorded data at multiple altitudes getting a great sample of conditions from many layers of the atmosphere as aircraft ascend and descend.
IIRC, during hurricane season some years ago, the PWS model outperformed hurricane path predictions from many other organizations in terms of accuracy, among other things.
I love this share too, and I suspect this weather data could be very useful!
[2] https://flyht.com/investors/news-and-media/view/flyht-acquir...
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twinkjock
This is a blatant ad…
mlyle
Is it, though?
It's not clear to me that they even still sell the weather service itself. They do sell the sensors, but this feels a little off target as a forum to sell either weather data or sensors for aircraft.
The poster claims no longer to be employed there, and hasn't obviously posted anything else on this topic.
And, well, TAMDAR data itself as used to improve forecasting is of broad interest.
Assume good faith.
rvnx
What is the problem with promoting your service ? Half of YC mantra is about hustling and spamming your company services everywhere, on boards, to other founders who might use the service, to investors, etc
antirez
Enough forks of dump1090 that eventually it changed name to... readsb :D Nice new features, but I opened the source tree and most of the original simplicity / understandability of the code is no longer there.
NitpickLawyer
A bit tangential, and speculative anecdote:
A few years ago, in the 2017-19 timeframe, android phones had the best "next few hours" weather prediction I've ever seen. It was way more accurate than wunderground, accuweather and all other web services. Sometime after 2019 it seems to have gone, and I wonder what happened.
Speculation: goog used the barometric sensors in many phones "near you" to increase the precision of their models, making "immediate timeframes" extremely precise.
No idea if this actually happened or it was confirmation bias on my part, would love for someone with knowledge to chime in. I also wonder why they stopped, if my speculation is correct. Data gathering stuff, perhaps?
inamberclad
I used to use a weather app on Android called DarkSky that did a pretty good job with local predictions. Apple bought them out.
MrGilbert
I remember that during COVID, the weather forecast got noticeably worse. One of the explanations I read was that, because so many planes were grounded, there was far less data for the models available. I‘m not sure which source that was from, though.
willglynn
This was TAMDAR data, which is a self-contained instrument package intended specifically for meteorological observations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAMDAR
Observations definitely fell off a cliff as commercial air travel slowed to a crawl. In terms of impact, though… it turned out not to be a big deal.
> Aircraft reports suffered a 75% decline in numbers from mid-March to mid-April 2020; in May the number started increasing again. Despite the loss of data there is no clear signal in the forecast skill—partly because the skill shows considerable variability on daily, seasonal, and interannual timescales (Figures 3 and 4). …
> …
> Overall, we can find no evidence that the decrease in aircraft observations has handicapped numerical forecasts of extreme weather to an extent large enough to incur significant economic impact.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
jimbobthrowawy
Glad to hear something's being done with the data from the weather radar most commercial jets have. The thought occurred to me about halfway through reading the blogpost.
I hope that data's available publicly, though likely not as publicly as ADSB broadcasts.
MrGilbert
Ah, nice - I learned something new today and ultimately can put that "funfact" to rest.^^
Thanks!
incognito124
Another factor was the rollout of 5G at that same time:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/5g-wireless-could...
firesteelrain
I don’t remember reading that but I had an ADSB receiver prior to COVID and I watched in real time as the aircraft traffic nearly stopped for months using the the data recorded by my receiver and parsed by FlightAware running on my Raspberry Pi 3B+ - as the world shut down.
throw0101d
Could the same be done with (marine) AIS?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...
therockspush
Flight plans are usually filed hours before a flight with old wind data and sometimes can't be changed in congested airspace.
But pilots really care about wind shear. Its the thing that makes people suddenly hit the overhead compartment. It typically requires flight crews reporting it to ATC over radio. Improving accuracy of local wind events is very valuable.
Robdel12
God I love this, I’ve been nerding out on weather for quite a while now. I need to build this, it looks so fun!
dceddia
This seems like a very useful weather product to supply to pilots. I wonder if anyone is already doing this? I know for instance Sirius XM weather has winds aloft info, but it’s not all that accurate in my (albeit limited) experience. I think that’s based on forecasts vs real time data though.
FL410
This is really cool and not what I was expecting. Nice work!
smath
Very cool!
Maybe I missed it but I didn’t quite follow why you needed to buy an adsb receiver if adsb exchange is already aggregating all the data
obrhubr
Initially I didn't realise historical data was available for free... I was also interested in learning more about the system itself, writing a diy decoder, etc... which is why I bought one. But yeah, kind of lost track of explaining that in the post :)
jagged-chisel
The receiver gives you realtime data in the immediate vicinity. The exchange gives you slightly older data from everywhere.
Determining what benefit this gives the operator is left as an exercise for the reader.
Another fun thing to do is to get mode c (barometric altitude) from aircraft transponders (either SSR or Mode-S downlink 5 or 21 - same physical layer as ADS-B just different bitfield header) and compare it to its GNSS altitude (from ADS-B most of the time) from the same aircraft (the Mode S address used as key) and you can build a map of atmospheric pressures.