This can be filed under “Who Knew!”.
An interesting fact you probably were not aware of, but for the last 14 years Lufthansa aircraft have been instrumental in helping improve weather forecasting. Over this span of time, 350 aircraft have served as remote weather stations with special software that collects meteorological data during flight and transmits it to the geniuses at Lufthansa Systems. Once at LH Systems, the data is deciphered, formatted and organized in such a way that it is useful to weather services worldwide.
The key piece of this concept is that no additional equipment is required. Information such as air temperature, barometric pressure, wind direction etc. that is already being gathered by the aircraft for “it’s” own use is simply processed through this special software requiring no additional effort by the crew.
Considering how inaccurate the typical weatherman is, they can use all the help that they can get. With it’s efforts, Lufthansa Systems suggests that they have been able to actually increase weather forecasting accuracy by 5 to 7%.
