Bridging the gaps between data collection and prediction at thunderstorm scales

虽然天气预报总体上显示出稳步的进展，但在过去十年中，对恶劣和破坏性天气的警告的及时性和质量并没有明显改善。即使所使用的工具和方法(预测模型、计算机等)变得更加复杂，这种情况也会发生。因此，我们认为，缺乏进展的原因是，作出任何预测所必需的大气现状没有得到正确的评估。如果是这样的话，我们就需要进行更多的研究工作，研究如何在恶劣天气可能发生的时间和地点更好地测量大气，以及如何改进测量方法，以向天气预报工具提供信息。由于风暴的形成和演变严重依赖于温度和湿度模式，而且由于现有仪器在大片地区很难测量到这些，特别是在多云或暴风雨的条件下，我们将把大部分精力放在这项任务上。

While weather forecasting in general is showing steady progress, the timeliness and quality of warnings for severe and damaging weather has not markedly improved in the past decade. This occurs even though the tools and approaches used (forecasting models, computers, etc) have become more sophisticated. We hence believe this lack of progress is due to the fact that the current state of the atmosphere, necessary to make any forecast, is not correctly assessed. If this is the case, then we need to perform more research work on how to better measure the atmosphere in conditions when and where severe weather can occur, as well as on how to improve how the measurements are being used to provide information to weather forecasting tools. Since storm formation and evolution is critically dependent on temperature and humidity patterns, and since those are poorly measured over large areas with existing instruments, particularly in cloudy or stormy conditions, it is on this task that we will put most of our efforts.