I keep "inventing" things and excitedly text my collaborator. They dutifully inform me: cool idea, it already exists.

Latest thing was using raw flight data (airspeed, position, altitude, etc) as input to a weather model.

Of course, this has already been done. I had no idea the extent of it though!'

There's still a lot of room to innovate and utilize the whole dataset.

https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2024/ecmwf-uses-mode-s-aircraft-observations-again-improve-forecasts

ECMWF uses Mode-S aircraft observations again to improve forecasts

ECMWF has started to use Mode-S aircraft observations again to improve the quality of forecasts after this type of data was found to be used in too large numbers during the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

ECMWF