Approximate simulation of stratospheric flow from aircraft data

We show how stratospheric data collected by an aircraft along its flight path can be used to initialize steady state approximate simulations of the stratospheric flow. To this end we reformulate the initial value problem for Boussinesq equations as a large system of stiff ordinary differential equations (using the method of lines). Initial conditions for this system are derived from the aircraft data. As a result we are able to compute the Brunt–Vaisala frequency, Richardson number and the vorticity in the vicinity of the flight path. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.