MITRE | The MITRE Digest | The Military and the Weather: You Can't Fool Mother Nature, But You Can Understand Her

The Military and the Weather: You Can't Fool Mother Nature, But You Can Understand Her

December 2004

The Air Force can plan for the right amount of planes and pilots to launch an operation, but it can't control the weather. High winds, thunder and lightning, sudden storms—these can all affect a mission. Thus, the Air Force and the other services spend a lot of time and resources collecting information about weather around the world. The Air Force's aptly named Weather Program collects and generates 4 terabytes of data—including observations, forecasts, warnings, and alerts—each day.

Consider that a single terabyte is equal to 1 million megabytes and you're talking about a lot of data to collect, sort, and push to a variety of end-users. MITRE is helping the Air Force define how it manages the flow of its weather data with the goal of getting that data to warfighters as quickly as possible. The fastest method sends data from machine-to-machine, bypassing the more traditional human process of giving briefings to groups, analyzing the data, and re-keying it into databases before passing it on to the warfighter in the field.

Moving from the traditional process to a machine-to-machine process involves a lot of change for a lot of people—Air Force Weather comprises three echelons: the Strategic Center, Operational Weather Squadrons, and Combat Weather Squadrons. There is also a lot of technological change involved in machine-to-machine processes, an area in which MITRE has a lot of experience. The Air Force asked MITRE to engineer its weather data systems to optimize the information flow for maximum speed and bandwidth. First, team members had to understand the wide breadth of information collected, where it came from, and who was using the data.

"Air Force Weather personnel provide all sorts of weather information, including textual, imagery, and what we call gridded data to both Air Force and Army users," says MITRE's Daniel Hebert. Hebert is chief engineer for the Air Force Weather Program in the Weather Systems Center of the Battle Management Wing, Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom Air Force Base. "Gridded data is a four- dimensional look at atmospheric conditions at various locations, altitudes, and times," says Hebert.

"The weather affects many of the military's daily decisions. For example, the Air Force needs to know what the winds are to calculate whether or not they will have enough fuel for the flight," says Hebert, "or if the planes will have to fly a different route because the winds are so bad. The Army may want to know about winds in a 400-mile-square area because of their effect on the ballistics of artillery shells," he says. "We also share our data with the other major services that do weather forecasting, such as the Navy, the National Weather Service, and other federal agencies."

Air Force Weather's three echelons have responsibilities for gathering different data from around the world. "Data is collected from thousands of weather balloons that are launched around the world every day," says Hebert. "We also get data from the National Weather Service, from weather planes, and from satellites. The raw data is sent to the Strategic echelon, which makes up traditional short-term weather forecasts and model calculations up to two weeks in advance of the forecast. These model runs may predict, for example, icing that will occur at 10,000 feet over Afghanistan or snow that will fall over Kosovo."

Within the Strategic Center is the Climatology Center, which looks at weather trends 10 to 30 years into the future. These trends might indicate typical wind direction and speed in parts of Africa during the spring or typical temperatures for those regions. While the Strategic Center stores its 4-terabytes of daily data in 20 to 30 terabytes of hard disk space, the Climatology Center uses upward of half a petabyte (1 million terabytes) of storage.

There are 12 Operational Weather Squadrons representing 12 regions in the world. "Their goal is to produce the forecast of the day for their region," says Hebert. "The squadron forecasters use a special set of graphic software, which we're upgrading, to analyze the large number of model runs for their region. One model run may say that it's going to rain for sure, but another model may say it might rain, and the third and fourth ones might say the chance of rain is pretty low.

"The forecasters look at all these model runs and use their meteorological judgment to decide which is the real forecast for the day, or their best shot at the forecast for the day. The models are similar to the type used by weather forecasters on TV except that ours look at additional variables such as volcanic ash and solar flares. The Air Force Weather algorithms are also different than those used by the national weather forecasting system."

The Combat Weather Teams are located at fixed bases, such as the 10th Combat Weather Squadron at Hurlbert Field, Florida, or deployed to various locations within the regions overseen by the Operational Weather Squadrons. "We have Combat Weather Teams with both the Army and the Air Force," says Hebert. They take the forecast of the day and apply it to the specific missions they are supporting."

The staffs in all three echelons require a mix of meteorological skills and information technology skills. Hebert notes that five staff meteorologists are located at the Air Force Electronic System Center at Hanscom Air Force Base, Bedford, Massachusetts—right down the road from one of MITRE's headquarters. This makes it easy for Hebert and his team to collaborate with the meteorologists.

The MITRE team is applying its machine-to-machine communication skills to help weather information flow freely from the Air Force's Strategic Center down to the operational Weather Squadrons, and then to the Combat Weather Teams. "To improve the timeliness of the weather data flow, we're moving toward service-oriented architectures using Web services," says Hebert. "To move information on the Web, we were a major contributor to the definition of the Joint Meteorological Broker Language (JMBL). The JMBL is an XML schema that defines exactly what set of XML tags will be used to represent and query the data and its associated metadata. That is a Joint standard that we've been working on for about three years."

"We're making progress, but there is still a lot of work to do," Hebert notes. For example, in some cases, coding in XML adds too much overhead to the amount of original information, such as image files that are already large. "We're researching technologies that might help us move large files better, optimizing bandwidth use," says Hebert. "We're also looking at advanced database replications to move files faster. And we're looking at how some companies are using new technologies to cache Web content so that servers can be used more efficiently with large number of users.

"There is a big push by the DOD to make weather collecting and forecasting a Joint operation shared by all the services, so eventually there will be one authoritative forecast for the theater. We want to keep this goal in mind while we're solving today's problems," says Hebert.

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