Meteomatics' Meteodrones as precise alternative to radiosondes: a comparison

Meteodrones are hexacopters equipped with specific sensors to collect information about temperature, humidity and wind in the lower and middle atmosphere. Besides being substantially more sustainable than radiosondes, Meteodrones have the significant advantage of measuring atmospheric conditions in a vertical profile instead of being deflected from their launching position by wind.

For continual verification of data quality, the measurements are compared to co-located standard measurements from radiosondes and evaluated against the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) observation requirements for high-resolution numerical weather prediction.

In addition to a selection of measurement profiles, we present the evaluation of atmospheric data within an extensive 6-month validation period, employing our improved processing algorithms. Therefore, we demonstrate the capability of automatically operated Meteodrones to close the meteorological data gap in the lower atmosphere in order to considerably improve numerical weather forecasts.