This is the best summary I could come up with:

The work is greatly expanding the accuracy of weather predictions, giving water managers more time to plan and communities earlier warnings to prepare, long before overhead clouds darken, but there’s far more to learn about these systems, especially as the dangers from them grow.

Sonnewald, an oceanographer who uses computer science to gain insights about the climate and long-range weather forecasts, added that recent advances in the satellite age helped paint a picture of how the ocean and the atmosphere interact.

That’s why a team of scientists led by Martin Ralph, the founding director of the center for western weather and water extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, began taking measurements directly from inside the storm systems themselves.

Since 2016, the atmospheric river reconnaissance program (AR recon) has relied on US air force “hurricane hunter” planes that drop a small cluster of instruments, known as dropsondes, that can transmit findings as they fall through the clouds and into the ocean below.

Air temperature, pressure, water vapor and wind speed are all collected by the dropsondes, like an “MRI for an atmospheric river”, according to Ralph, enabling researchers to see inside the system rather than having to rely on satellite imagery.

During a series of strong atmospheric river storms that hit California in 2023, the dropsondes helped advance some forecasts of heavy precipitation by roughly 12%, an achievement researchers believe would have taken eight additional years using traditional data-gathering methods.

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