Jet stream winds - Enhanced aircraft data acquisition and analysis over Southwest Asia

A project is described for providing the accurate initial and verification analyses for the jet stream in regions where general circulation models are known to have large systematic errors, either due to the extreme sparsity of data or to incorrect physical parameterizations. For this purpose, finely spaced aircraft-based meteorological data for the Southwest Asian regions collected for three 10-day periods in the winter of 1988-1989 will be used, together with corresponding data for the North American regions used as a control, to rerun the assimilation cycles and forecast models of the NMC and the NASA Goddard Laboratory for Atmospheres. Data for Southeast Asia will be collected by three carriers with extensive wide-body routes crossing the total region, while data for the North American region will be obtained from the archives of ACARS and GTS.