In-flight icing has been blamed for dozens of accidents a year, along with detours that can extend for hundreds of miles. Smaller/general aviation aircraft are especially vulnerable, both because they fly lower and because some don’t have the deicing equipment found on commercial aircraft. At the request of the Federal Aviation Administration, NCAR devised products that show where conditions are ripe for supercooled water droplets—those that remain liquid even in subfreezing temperatures, which enables them to land on an aircraft wing and freeze. These products were credited in an independent, FAA-commissioned report with preventing an average of eight accidents a year, saving lives and reducing costs by more than $60 million annually.

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Traditional weather forecasts don’t provide detail at the height of wind turbines (typically around 200 feet), but such information is critical for getting the most out of existing turbines and for placing new ones. Utilities need accurate wind forecasts to know when to power on and off the traditional power plants that back up wind energy. If a forecast is wrong, a utility may need to purchase energy from the spot market, which is very costly. In late 2008, NCAR scientists and software engineers teamed up with Xcel, the nation’s lead utility in wind energy, to tackle the wind forecasting challenge. The resulting system uses computer models to make high-resolution wind energy forecasts. The system then generates wind energy forecasts every 15 minutes out to three hours and on an hourly basis out to 168 hours. Underlying the system is a wealth of basic scientific research carried out by NCAR scientists on atmospheric dynamics, numerical weather prediction, computer modeling, data assimilation, statistical techniques, and more.

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There are few places to launch weather balloons over the ocean, and satellites can’t gather all the important detail on hurricanes and other oceanic storms. In the 1970s, NCAR began developing dropsondes: instruments dropped from aircraft that descend by parachute into the heart of storms. “Hurricane hunters” have used thousands of dropsondes since then to assess the central pressure of tropical cyclones—how strong they are—as well as the amount of moisture present and other data critical to monitoring and prediction. In the 1990s, NCAR developed a new dropsonde based on GPS technology. The resulting data likely saved millions in evacuation costs by improving hurricane track forecasting an average of 10 to 20% in the crucial 48 hours before a hurricane strikes the U.S. coastline. The latest version of NCAR’s GPS dropsonde system can gather wind data from twice as many dropsondes as before, and because it reports twice as often as before (four times per second), more information is provided from each dropsonde as it falls. The sondes can now be launched via remote commands to an unpiloted aircraft, such as the NASA Global Hawk, or to a high-altitude balloon.

UCAR also works to advance science by strengthening education, especially at the undergraduate and graduate level. One of the main programs for this is Unidata, which was designed by universities for universities. In the late 1970s, universities were about to lose their free access to routine weather data then being provided by the National Weather Service through teletype and facsimile circuits. Many schools couldn’t afford to purchase these data, which meant their students and researchers wouldn’t be able to analyze current weather events and save the data for later research. Universities asked for help, and the result was the creation of Unidata, supported by NSF, based at UCAR, and steered by the academic community. The program gives students and faculty around the world access to the specialized data they need. It also provides software and training to help them use the data most effectively. The program has expanded from a focus on synoptic and mesoscale meteorology alone to an emphasis on Earth system science and other geoscience fields.