New Met Office Partnership with FLYHT and Loganair to Improve Forecasts of High Impact Weather

CALGARY, AB / ACCESSWIRE / August 30, 2023 / A collaboration between the Met Office, FLYHT Aerospace Solutions Ltd. (TSX-V:FLY)(OTCQX:FLYLF) and Loganair, aims to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts and the prediction of localised severe weather in the UK,with expected benefits for the aviation industry such as more efficient route planning and supporting aims to reduce CO₂ emissions.

The partnership provides the Met Office with FLYHT-WVSS-II atmospheric water vapour sensors to be installed on Loganair Embraer 145 aircraft flying across the UK. The sensors will continuously monitor environmental conditions around the aircraft during flight.

The Met Office is particularly interested in data collected during the ascent and descent phases of flight as this will provide a view of humidity, temperature, and wind measurements throughout the atmosphere. The use of this increase in observational data, is only possible because of the new Met Office supercomputer, which is coming online early in 2024. It will ultimately improve the forecasting of local scale weather. The relative humidity sensors will be fully integrated with FLYHT's Certus SatCom and AFIRS Edge multi-channel WQAR for real-time data transmission of aircraft-based observations.

These readings will help to better predict extreme weather such as the Cumbrian storms of 2015, as well as improve local forecasting of, conditions such as thunderstorms, fog, and showers. Adverse weather presents one of the biggest risks and safety factors for aircraft operations and can impact flights as well as ground-crew operations and maintenance tasks, further affecting scheduling and planning issues and adding to flight safety risks. Across Europe, weather is one of the largest contributing factors to aviation delays. It exacerbates the volatility of an already disrupted network at capacity. Better weather observations will greatly improve weather-based flight planning and real-time updates, thereby enabling more efficient avoidance of severe weather and turbulence. This initiative will also help airlines understand the formation of contrails, and potentially enable a reduction in contrail formation, which has been identified as a sustainability goal within the airline industry.