Coronavirus: Pandemic ‘could ruin weather forecasts, climate records’

Lockdowns have halted meteorological monitoring exercises, ruining efforts to forecast weather and analyse climate.

Hurricane Harvey nears landfallin the US. The pandemic is hurting meteorologists’ ability to predict weather events. Picture: AFP.

The global coronavirus pandemic could ruin our ability to forecast the weather and predict climate change as global lockdowns cause ecological and meteorological monitoring exercises to halt, meteorologists warn.

Science journal Nature reports that this disruption in scientific activity will compromise future forecasting efforts by creating yawning gaps in decades-long data sets used to make predictions.

"The break in the scientific record is probably unprecedented,” University of California Santa Barbara ecologist Frank Davis told the journal.

Mr Davis, who is the executive director of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, says coronavirus lockdowns have disrupted the ability of LTER scientists to monitor the effects of weather and environmental events at 30 ecological sites from Alaska to Antarctica.

At some sites, it is the first interruption to monitoring in more than four decades.

"That's painful for the scientists involved," Mr Davis said.

Weather monitoring programs are facing similar issues, as scientists often collect data on commercial container ships or leverage data collected by commercial flights.

As the quantity of these services decrease, so has the amount of data collected.

The meteorological data provided by the US aircraft decreased to half its normal levels as of 31 March, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"It’s certainly the case that with the virtual loss of worldwide aviation, there is a gap in some of the records,” said Grahame Madge, spokesperson for the UK Meteorological Office.

The Meteorological Office estimates that the loss of aircraft data will increase forecast errors by one to two per cent, and more in areas where flight activity is higher.

Program specialist at the International Oceanographic Commission in Paris Emma Heslop told Nature that the measurements made at sea were important in helping to forecast weather patterns over the ocean and keeping longer-term records on the effects of climate change on oceans.

Ms Heslop said that shipboard observations had decreased by 15 per cent since February, with the scientific community scrambling to figure out alternative ways to collect the data as the pandemic continues.

“The longer the restrictions are in place, the longer it will take for our operations to recover," she said.

Many other forms of data are collected mostly autonomously, with Nature writing that The Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases experiment, which measures greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting compounds in our atmosphere at 13 sights around the world, is mostly unaffected by the pandemic as each station is staffed by just one or two individuals.

Ray Weiss, atmospheric chemist at project leader Scripps, said two of the instruments had broken down so far, but the loss of an instrument or even one of the 13 sites for an entire week was unlikely to compromise the monitoring capabilities of the project.

However, as the pandemic drags on, the likelihood of significant disruption increases.

“We’re limping through, is the bottom line," Mr Weiss told Nature.