Originally Posted by
freezingflyboy
I think we had TAMDAR or something similar on our Seminole's when I was at UND. From my understanding, they gathered weather data for NASA, NOAA or our meteorology department. No one I talked to really knew a whole lot about it. Just one day a few of our airplanes had extra antennas on em. Any other Flying Sioux know any more about it?
Yeah, we've got TAMDAR on most, not all though I think, of our Seminole's. We have no way of controlling it, it just sorta sits there in the nose and does its own thing. It looks sorta like an extra pitot tube.
It measures temperature, relative humidity, pressure, and icing. It can calculate pressure altitude, IAS, TAS, turbulence, and wind direction and speed. On climbout it takes measurements every 6 seconds, in cruise every 3 minutes, and in descent every minute. The data is uploaded in near real time to a satellite that's funded by NASA and run by AirDat.
I guess they use the information to make more accurate forecasts.