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Weather mission crucial to OIR air operations

  • Published
  • By Master Sgt. Eric M. Sharman
  • 386th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs
SOUTHWEST ASIA --  Every day, usually before you even get into the office, the same email comes to your inbox. Maybe you glance at it, maybe you don’t. You feel as though you could get the same information from any number of websites. What you may not realize, is that weather operations have a profound impact on mission planning and capability in a deployed environment.

“Weather prediction is kind of a science and an art.” said Tech. Sgt. Keith Wilson, 386th Expeditionary Operations Support Squadron weather technician. “It’s not just about reading the data, but interpreting how it could potentially react with other regional forecast models and systems, to make a reliable prediction.”

The data Wilson complies comes from meteorological satellites, as well as an on-site monitoring station. His office, weather operations, maintains a portable Doppler RADAR station, with which they can track temperature, pressure, moisture, winds and even dust activity within a 350 kilometer radius.  Beyond that range, they rely on Doppler units from other agencies and satellite data. All of these data factors come into play when planning air operations.

“One of the biggest impacts here is wind. With our airdrop mission, I have to give the flight crews wind forecasts at different intervals along their flight path, and if that wind changes it could mean the difference between resupplying our guys, or missing the drop zone by a half mile and resupplying our enemies,” said Wilson.

In addition to pushing aircraft and airdrop packages off course, the winds here also move sand. Sandstorms can plague an aircrew with low visibility, and easily force an aircrew to have to divert to a different landing site, in the event that visibility is too poor. That, combined with the extreme heat, can create a variety of challenges.

“The greatest threats seem to be dust storms and the extreme heat.  The heat can negatively impact aircraft performance and decrease the amount of cargo we can carry,” said Major Bret Peters, the 737th Airlift Squadron assistant director of operations. “The other significant challenge we face here is dust storms.  Not only are they a pain to work in, they can decrease visibility quite a bit.”

The data Wilson and his team provide allows aircrews to mitigate and minimize the threat of high winds and sand storms. Accurate information on these threats can significantly impact mission planning.

 “We have to be aware of all of the weather in the CENTCOM region because we provide them with divert landing locations.” said Wilson.  “These missions have to have a viable alternate landing plan before they take off, because quite simply, weather shapes the battle space.”

Peters said that with all the challenges the weather operations team does a great job of forecasting and determining what we will be experiencing.

“Their role is vital in the successful accomplishment of our mission.” said Peters.