Shopping CartExplorations: Exploring the Upper Air
Jeffrey Rosenfeld explains in his book, Eye of the Storm, Inside the World’s Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards (New York: Plenum Trade, 1999) that until the nineteenth century “altitude was a nearly meaningless dimension” to scientists interested in the atmosphere (74). Rosenfeld tells the story of how this started to change with the 1783 flight of the Montgolfer brothers and flights by balloonists later that century and into the nineteenth century (74–82).
Other sources include:
- NWS’s A Brief History of Upper-air Observations Web page
- Meteorological Kites: Scientific Kites of the Industrial Revolution Web site
- NWS’s Upper-air Observations Program Web site with links to a FAQ list and detailed information on various observing systems.
- Automated airline data: William R. Moninger, Richard D. Mamrosh, and Patricia M. Pauley, “Automated Meteorological Reports from Commercial Aircraft,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 84 (February 2003): 203–216
- Effects of the September 11, 2001, attacks on forecasting models: Author’s e-mail exchanges with William R. Moninger, of the NOAA, for his monthly The Weather Never Sleeps column in the June 2005 issue of Flight Training Magazine.
- TAMDAR data collection from commuter airliners: E-mail exchanges with Rick Ferguson, Vice President of Operations, AirDat LLC, and the AirDat Web site.
