The Impact of COVID-19 on Weather Forecasts: A Balanced View

Aircraft reports are an important source of information for numerical weather prediction (NWP). From March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a large loss of aircraft data but despite this it is difficult to see any evidence of significant degradation in the forecast skill of global NWP systems. This apparent discrepancy is partly because forecast skill is very variable, showing both day-to-day noise and lower frequency dependence on the mean state of the atmosphere. The definitive way to cleanly assess aircraft impact is using a data denial experiment, which shows that the largest impact is in the upper troposphere. The method used by Chen (2020, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020gl088613) to estimate the impact of COVID-19 is oversimplistic. Chen understates the huge importance of satellite data for modern weather forecasts and raises more alarm than necessary about a drop in forecast accuracy.