This paper describes the operational method of extracting meteorological information from all airborne aircraft in the European airspace every 20 s to 1 min. The methodology is described, and the quality of the wind and temperature observations is evaluated against radiosonde and other aircraft observations.

AMDAR temperatures suffer from a bias, which can be related to a difference in the timing of height and measurement and to internal corrections applied to pressure altitude. Based on NWP model temperature data, combined with Mach number and true airspeed, we could estimate corrections. Comparing corrected temperatures with (independent) radiosonde observations demonstrates a reduction in the bias, from 0.5 K to around zero, and standard deviation, of almost 10 %.