A major weather forecast bust that lasted six days in March 2014 is a bitter memory for European meteorologists. The error was traced back to a wrong assumption on wind speed at an altitude of 11 km (36,000 ft.) over the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Strong westerly winds in that area went undetected. Erroneous initial conditions were injected in predictive models, causing the forecast fiasco. No direct measurement of wind speed in that area was available. In fact, weather specialists are ...
