Project Jet Stream

Abstract

The importance of “jet streams” and other near-tropopause phenomena to aircraft operations led to the establishment by the Air Force of a project for probing these regions. Two specially instrumented aircraft, a B-47 jet bomber and a B-29, are the data gathering vehicles. Their instrumentation is discussed and examples of the data gathered thus far are given. These data show that significant maxima and minima of wind speed can occur between reporting stations and indicate that at jet stream levels, the gradient wind is a much better approximation to observed space-averaged winds than the geostrophic.