where do meteorologists get intel from other than weather stations?
Answers
Pretty much every nation has a national network of weather observation stations, both manned and automatic, and generally speaking most nations share their data fairly freely with one another. The stations provide regular, periodic weather observations (temperature, humidity, rainfall, cloudiness, wind, etc.) at fixed locations. Additional sources of data are the weather radar systems, used to detect clouds, precipitation, and other data; weather satellites, which provide views of the earth and the clouds above it in visible light and infrared; and radiosondes, probes launched by weather balloons to provide information about the air above the ground. Another source that is proving very useful in the United States, at least, is AMDAR data: weather data routinely recorded by commercial airplanes, collected by the airlines, and shared with the National Weather Service. All of this data, plus other sources, is fed into computers and made available both to forecasters directly and to modeling systems that produce predictions based on computer algorithms.