Excellent questions. Regarding climate: there are many indications that measurements of atmospheric pressure are useful in forecasting longer-range trends. For

Excellent questions. Regarding climate: there are many indications that measurements of atmospheric pressure are useful in forecasting longer-range trends. For example, the pressure over the Tibetan plateau can have a large affect on El Niño. Additionally, we've collected atmosphere data over a period of years, and we expect to find interesting climactic trends as well as shorter-term weather trends. Here's a paper by Cliff and Luke regarding dense surface-level pressure observations: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-13-00269.1?af=R http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-13-00269.1... > I wonder if it's possible to quantify how much a perfectly-accurate ground-level pressure field could constrain upper atmosphere dynamics Yes it is possible and we're working on this currently. There are some neat math techniques that we can use to estimate what kind of forecast accuracy increase we'll get with a dense network - but the only way to actually know is to scale up and start running experiments to find all the thresholds for improvements and diminishing returns.