From research to operations: the EMADDC use case

The European Meteorological Aircraft Derived Data Centre (EMADDC) is an operational centre in development to utilize all aircraft in the European airspace to derive upper air wind and temperature observations.

The lecture will provide a high level overview of EMADDC and focus on the origination, the methods used, the EMADDC data and use cases and the unique partnerships. Also, the latest developments concerning global geographical coverage will be presented.   

New air traffic control surveillance technologies such as Mode-S Enhanced Surveillance radars (Mode- S EHS) present great opportunities to obtain or derive large quantities of wind direction, wind speed and temperature observations in numbers unprecedented in the European region.

EMADDC is a EUMETNET program, led by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), for the collection, processing and dissemination of quality controlled meteorological upper air observations, based on aircraft data. Observations derived from sensors onboard aircraft are more or less instantaneously collected by Mode-S EHS radars of Air Traffic Control Centres and by local Mode-S/ADS-B receivers. By agreement, EMADDC receives these observations from Air Navigation Service Providers and local Mode-S/ADS-B operators, such as UK Met Office and Air Support, directly.

EMADDC is a true partnership program linked to the meteorological and aeronautical domain and is supported by several commercial and non-commercial organisations. EMADDC is co-funded by the European Union via the Connecting Europe Facility (SESAR Deployment).

Each day approximately 25 million temperature and 35 million wind observations, quality controlled, are being made available to stakeholders for use in data assimilation by NWP centres such as ECMWF, or to be used operationally in meteorological forecasting offices.

Information about EMADDC is available at https://emaddc.com