“It was very clear at the time that the telephones are probably to incorporate pretty vital data,” Mr. Barr stated, adding that President Trump had also questioned Apple for enable.

Apple did not promptly reply to a request for comment. It has argued that data privateness is a human legal rights difficulty and that if it had been to establish a way to let the American govt into its phones, hackers or international governments like China could exploit the identical instrument.

Officers would not say that Al Qaeda directed Mr. Alshamrani to have out the December taking pictures. But they emphasised his longstanding ties and communications with best Qaeda leaders that proved his romantic relationship with the team went further than merely remaining motivated to act based on seeing YouTube videos or reading through extremist propaganda.

The evidence acquired from Mr. Alshamrani’s cellular phone confirmed that the Pensacola assault was “the brutal blend of decades of arranging and planning.” Mr. Wray said.

Mr. Alshamrani paused to fire at his Iphone during a firefight with protection officers and he was found with a 2nd, poorly harmed phone that the Saudi wrecked, major investigators to conclude that the products held critical information.

The office reported that it sought Apple’s enable in opening the telephones only after other businesses, foreign governments and 3rd-social gathering technology distributors experienced unsuccessful, and it accused the company of slowing the investigation and letting sales opportunities to go cold.

The evening prior to the attack, Mr. Alshamrani experienced showed videos of mass shootings to guests at a evening meal social gathering, and he had posted anti-American, anti-Israeli and jihadist social media messages.

While the F.B.I. has expended the final couple of years principally trying to thwart global terrorism inspired by the Islamic Condition, Mr. Wray explained to lawmakers very last year that Al Qaeda nevertheless would like to conduct “large-scale, magnificent assaults,” but is “likely to concentrate on making its worldwide affiliate marketers and supporting small-scale, commonly achievable attacks”

Even nevertheless the casualty rely was fairly reduced by Qaeda criteria, simply just “pulling off a profitable assault on U.S. soil can offer Al Qaeda and its affiliate marketers with a momentum strengthen and make it possible for the group bragging legal rights in excess of the Islamic Condition, which is essential in terms of recruitment, prestige, and propaganda,” Colin P. Clarke, a senior fellow at the Soufan Center, a New York-based mostly exploration organization, explained in an e mail on Monday.

“This illustrates just how unsafe one operative can be,” Mr. Wray explained.

Even nevertheless Mr. Alshamrani was considered to have operated alone, the government expelled 21 other Saudi pupils who had been schooling with the American navy, some of whom experienced links to extremist actions. Following asserting the expulsions, Mr. Barr stated that the Saudi federal government experienced cooperated with the investigation.

Saudi Arabia has a challenging romantic relationship with Yemen, exactly where it has been embroiled in a lethal, yearslong armed service battle to close Iranian influence there. Amid the airstrikes, the Islamic Point out and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula have seized territory and carried out their individual fatal attacks.

Mr. Alshamrani’s ability to train on the base as portion of the U.S. navy raises a host of thorny problems, like how the Defense Department screens prospective recruits from Saudi Arabia. Mr. Barr mentioned that the screening and vetting system in this circumstance was inadequate, and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper pledged in a statement to hold up more safeguards that the Pentagon experienced now installed.

Following the shooting, the Protection Department ordered a end to all international armed service college student education at American installations. In January, Mr. Esper imposed tighter limits on the use of firearms and access to authorities facilities for international army pupils. He authorised the ongoing monitoring of intercontinental pupils while they are enrolled in U.S.-based mostly schooling courses.

The shooting also reignited the debate about when a technologies business ought to be envisioned to aid the govt obtain details from encrypted messaging apps that can only be identified if you can bypass the password and other protection attributes. Apple routinely presents law enforcement lawful access to information that its people retail outlet in their iCloud accounts.

Although it was not apparent how the F.B.I. acquired into Mr. Alshamrani’s iPhones, there are indications that Apple’s protection is not as uncrackable as it made use of to be.

Very last 7 days, Zerodium, a enterprise that acquires and sells weaknesses in smartphone encryption to American agencies to hack into those people units, declared it has a surplus of this kind of exploits for Apple’s iOS cell running procedure.

The firm’s claims undermine the Justice Department’s and the F.B.I.’s assertions that Apple’s security is avoiding lawful interception of knowledge assortment, primarily on more mature product phones. Mr. Alshamrani had an Apple iphone 7 and an Apple iphone 5.

But Mr. Barr has managed a person of the department’s “highest priorities” is to discover a way to get know-how businesses to aid law enforcement acquire lawful accessibility to encrypted technological know-how.

Nicole Perlroth and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

The first evacuees stepped off a plane Thursday night from Dubai, arriving in the southern state of Kerala.

“Jai Hind!” Hail India! an Air India pilot wearing protective gear cheered in a clip shown on Indian news channels.

On Friday, two naval ships carrying around 1,000 Indians set sail from Male, the capital of the Maldives. The crews, like those on the airliners, wore protective equipment and passengers covered their faces with.

So the government is walking a fine line: trying to bring home Indians without bringing home the virus. After arrival, passengers will be sent to quarantine facilities for 14 days.

Requests for help getting home have been the greatest from the Persian Gulf, where an estimated 8.5 million Indians work. Many are desperate. Anbalal Peer Mohammad, a construction worker who has overstayed his visa in Kuwait and is now being housed with other Indian workers in a school, was elated when he heard he might get out.

“I smell like a sewer. I haven’t had a bath since last week,” Mr. Mohammad said. “I just want to return home and never look back.”

When Valentine Ochogo arrived home in Kenya after being laid off from her job in Dubai, she was put in quarantine in a university dormitory with other travelers — one step in the government’s aggressive, often-praised campaign to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

But instead of the mandated 14-day quarantine period, she was confined for 32 days, often cold, hungry and so frightened that, she said, she blocked the door at night with an empty bed. Although Ms. Ochogo tested negative for the coronavirus three times, she said that government officials would not release her until she paid $434 in fees.

After she managed to negotiate the amount down to $65, Ms. Ochogo, 26, was freed.

“Am out,” a relieved Ms. Ochogo texted on April 24, saying later, “I got really lucky.”

Kenya’s government is now facing mounting criticism for its response to the pandemic — particularly its use of quarantine centers.

The measures may have helped to suppress the number of cases in this East African nation: a country of about 47 million people has so far reported 607 cases, 29 fatalities and 197 recoveries.

Citizens stopped by the police for violating curfew or not wearing masks have been sent not to police stations, but to quarantine, sometimes held in compounds with people known to be infected.

“During an emergency like this, you need to be persuading people to cooperate rather than coercing them, especially if your argument is that it is in their best interest,” said Dr. Lukoye Atwoli, associate professor at the Moi University School of Medicine and the vice president of the Kenya Medical Association.

Andrew Higgins, the Times bureau chief in Moscow, first visited the city in 1982 as a student, and has spent much of his career living there and covering Russia. His latest stint there, for The Times, began in 2016.

As the coronavirus began its silent but relentless march on Moscow in February, the names of the millions of Russian soldiers killed in the far deadlier horrors of World War II were already appearing, one by one, on state television, scrolling down the screen in a harrowing torrent.

The Kremlin offered soothing words about the pandemic, saying that Russia would not suffer too badly. So, the names kept coming, day after day, mourning Russia’s wartime martyrs at a staggering rate of more than 6,000 a minute.

But at the end of March, when the coronavirus crisis could no longer be glossed over, the names suddenly vanished from TV. And Russia awoke from its glorious, morbid memories of the Red Army’s defeat of Nazi Germany 75 years ago to confront an insidious enemy that kept getting closer and more menacing.

The pandemic arrived with full force in Moscow just as the Russian capital was preparing to celebrate Victory Day on May 9, a joyous annual holiday filled with national pride that transcends all of Russia’s many divisions. The timing has left the city in a strangely expectant yet suspended state.

The grand party has been canceled, but this becalmed and still beguilingly beautiful city is all decked out for a big celebration. Copies of the red banner that was raised above the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945 fly on every silent street. A flyby over the city by warplanes and military helicopters is still on for Saturday, but Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, has told residents not to go out to watch it.

Police cars, meanwhile, cruise the streets, blaring a taped message on an endless loop: “Respected citizens. We ask you not to leave your home unnecessarily. Take care of your health and do not allow the infection of fellow citizens.”

Restrictions announced in March by the mayor, Mr. Sobyanin, have put the city in a lockdown more severe than those imposed on New York and London. All parks, restaurants and stores — other than those selling food, medicine and other essential items — are closed.

The rules, announced just as Moscow was shaking off the last icy chill of a long winter, make no provision for exercise, except for pet-owners, who are allowed to walk their dogs within 100 yards of their homes.

But that has not happened.

Doctors in overwhelmed hospitals in Mexico City say the reality of the epidemic is being hidden from the country. In some hospitals, patients lie on the floor, splayed on mattresses. Older people are propped up on metal chairs because there are not enough beds, while patients are turned away to search for space in less-prepared hospitals. Many die while searching, several doctors said.

“It’s like we doctors are living in two different worlds, ” said Dr. Giovanna Avila, who works at Hospital de Especialidades Belisario Domínguez. “One is inside of the hospital with patients dying all the time. And the other is when we walk out onto the streets and see people walking around, clueless of what is going on and how bad the situation really is.”

Mexico City officials have tabulated more than 2,500 deaths from the virus and serious respiratory illnesses that doctors think are related to Covid-19, the data reviewed by The Times shows. Yet the federal government is reporting about 700 deaths in the area, which includes Mexico City and the municipalities on its outskirts.

The government says Mexico has been faring better than many of the world’s largest countries, and on Monday its Covid-19 czar estimated that the final death toll would be around 6,000 people.

“We have flattened the curve,” Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the health ministry official who has become the face of the country’s response, said this week. The government did not respond to questions about the deaths in Mexico City.

Even as Indonesia grapples with a growing coronavirus outbreak, its leaders have relaxed travel restrictions meant to tame the epidemic in the world’s fourth-most-populous nation.

The travel restrictions were imposed on April 24, as Indonesia approached the heaviest travel season of the year, when tens of millions of people disperse across the sprawling archipelago ahead of the Muslim period of Ramadan.

On Thursday, commercial flights on Garuda, the national carrier, began operating again, with stipulations that only people traveling for business or family emergencies could book flights. Other airlines are expected to begin flying this weekend.

But critics noted that there are no practical measures in place to ensure that people were traveling for business, not for mudik, or “exodus,” as the Ramadan travel is called. And they argue that the initial travel ban was put in place far too late, allowing millions of Indonesians to spread the virus across the country.

On May 6, Indonesia recorded 484 new cases of the coronavirus, its largest daily increase. As of Friday, the country’s caseload had exceeded 13,000, but there has been little testing and experts believe the figure is far higher.

There were no poignant handshakes with veterans. Military parades were canceled. Wreaths were laid, but with appropriate social distancing.

Friday was the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, but across the continent, commemoration ceremonies and public events were scrapped. Instead, with public life restricted because of the coronavirus threat, Europeans largely celebrated the day at home.

On May 8, 1945 in Berlin, military commanders signed Germany’s unconditional surrender, ending nearly six years of mass slaughter, forced displacement and persecution. Tens of thousands of people flocked to the streets of Allied cities to celebrate.

Estimates vary, but at least 70 million people died globally in the war, an overwhelming majority of them civilians. Among them were the six million Jews and millions of others killed systematically by the Nazi regime, many of them in concentration camps.

In Britain on Friday, people were invited to stand and raise a toast while the BBC broadcast a speech by Winston Churchill. A speech from Queen Elizabeth II will be broadcast at 9 p.m., the hour when her father, George VI, addressed the nation 75 years before.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron oversaw commemorative ceremonies in Paris, without the usual crowds that usually and without the president’s traditional walk up the Champs-Élysées to review troops.

The few government and military officials who participated stood conspicuously far apart as the national anthem played rang beneath the Arc de Triomphe, where Mr. Macron laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier. He called upon his fellow citizens to hang France’s flag from their windows and balconies.

European countries should continue to block most external travelers for an additional month, until June 15, the European Commission said on Friday.

The commission’s recommendation refers to non-essential travel, and was offered to 26 of its 27 member states. The exception is Ireland, which is in a separate travel zone with the United Kingdom and follows different policies. The commission also suggested that Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland — which are not European Union members but are part of the passport-free Schengen area — continue to block outside visitors for the same period.

The future relaxation of the restrictions should be phased, the commission said, with internal border controls between European Union countries lifted “gradually and in a coordinated manner.”

European citizens and their family members, as well as long-term residents of the bloc, can still return home. Essential workers, including health care staff and seasonal workers, should also be allowed to move freely, the commission said.

Each country is theoretically free to follow or ignore the advice, and the prolonged closure of borders to outside visitors is set to become more controversial with the onset of the economically important summer season, which normally sees millions of tourists flock to the region’s beaches and capitals.

The Labor Department said Friday that the American economy shed more than 20.5 million jobs in April, sending the unemployment rate to 14.7 percent — a level of devastation not seen since the Great Depression.

The report underscores the speed and depth of the labor market’s collapse as the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns saw the crisis deepen. In February, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, a half-century low. And even since the survey was taken, millions of people have filed claims for jobless benefits.

The April job losses alone far exceed the 8.7 million in the last recession, when unemployment peaked at 10 percent in October 2009. The only comparable period came when the rate reached about 25 percent in 1933, before the government began publishing official statistics. And if anything, the report understates the damage.

But in an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Friday morning, President Trump predicted the economy would come roaring back after the “artificial” closing caused by the lockdown.

“Those jobs will all be back and they’ll be back very soon,” Mr. Trump said, “and next year we’re going to have a phenomenal year.”

Low-wage workers, including many women and members of racial and ethnic minority groups, have been hit especially hard. Many service jobs are impossible to do remotely and have been eliminated, and some workers have risked their health by staying on the job.

The coronavirus pandemic has unleashed “a tsunami of hate,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said on Friday, calling for an all-out effort from the global community to fight hate speech and from political leaders to promote social cohesion.

Migrants and refugees have been vilified as a source of the virus and denied access to medical treatment, he said, and older people, among the most vulnerable to the virus, were targeted by “contemptible memes” suggesting that they were the most expendable.

Mr. Guterres condemned an explosion of anti-foreigner sentiment online and in the streets, and the spread of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.

“We must act now to strengthen the immunity of our societies against the virus of hate,” Mr. Guterres said.

United Nations human rights officials, underscoring the secretary general’s concerns, voiced dismay on Friday over the coordinated pushbacks of migrants trying to reach Europe from Libya and limitations European governments have imposed on volunteer rescue vessels in the Mediterranean.

Six weeks after Mr. Guterres first appealed for a global cease-fire to allow the world to concentrate on fighting the pandemic, Michele Bachelet, the United Nations human rights chief, expressed alarm on Friday that Islamic State militants and other armed groups in Syria were instead exploiting global preoccupation with coronavirus to step up attacks.

The Islamic State has mounted three attacks in Syria’s southern Daraa governorate in the past two weeks, Ms. Bachelet said, reporting an escalation of targeted killings and violence in an area that the government recaptured from opposition groups two years ago.

Armed groups, including government security forces, have carried out more than 50 targeted killings in Daraa alone since the start of March, human rights investigators said, and civilians have suffered dozens of casualties in escalating violence in Turkish-occupied areas of northern Syria and Kurdish-controlled areas in the northeast.

A fragile cease-fire brokered by Russia and Turkey in northwestern Syria has “generally” held, Ms. Bachelet said, but “if the current patterns of violations and abuses continue to spread and escalate, there is a risk the country will enter another spiral of extreme and widespread violence.”

Amazon will seek approval on Friday from workers councils, which represent around 10,000 employees, to keep its six mammoth French warehouses shut until May 13, as it consults with them on steps to further enhance safety measures against the coronavirus.

“We are working hard to resume business as usual for our French customers, our French employees and our French sellers,” Amazon said in a statement.

Amazon’s warehouses in France have been shut for nearly a month after a court sided in mid-April with French unions that had sued the company, accusing it of inadequately protecting workers from the threat of the virus and failing to consult with the unions on the measures, as required by law. The court ruled that Amazon must restrict deliveries to only food, hygiene and medical products until it addressed the issue, or face millions of euros in potential fines.

Sixteen migrant workers in central India were crushed to death by a locomotive on Friday morning as they were journeying home, the latest casualties connected to India’s coronavirus lockdown and the efforts to reopen parts of the economy.

The migrants were among the enormous wave of causal workers who have been streaming out of India’s cities back to their home villages. In recent days, India’s government, which at first had blocked migrants from moving state to state, eased the lockdown rules to allow some migrants to travel.

“They thought trains were not moving and it was a safe spot,” said Dyanoba Banapure, a government official in the area.

On Thursday, a factory owned by the South Korean conglomerate LG emitted a cloud of toxic vapor that enveloped several nearby villages in Visakhapatnam. Preliminary investigations indicate that the accident was caused by a leak in a styrene tank that had not been checked in weeks.

The plastics factory was in the process of reopening for the first time since India’s lockdown was imposed in late March when the accident happened.

Officials said dangerous pressure had been building in the styrene tank during the lockdown and that factory workers improperly opened a valve on the tank, releasing a huge cloud of toxic vapor that left people dying in nearby roads and hundreds others rushing to hospitals.

Li Mingqin’s factory in central China makes products for happy times, using feathers from chickens and other poultry to produce masquerade masks and badminton shuttlecocks. But with the pandemic, new orders have come to a screeching halt and she, like many other small business owners, wonders how she will survive.

She has more than 100 employees whom she has not paid in a month, and whom she promises to pay in June. She has hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of feathers and other supplies stacked in a warehouse.

But tapping all that credit requires having a banking relationship. The banks deal mainly with state-owned enterprises and some of the larger private businesses. Companies like Ms. Li’s, the Gelan Handicraft Factory in Anhui province, have struggled to obtain bank loans and rely mainly on borrowing from friends and relatives — and many of them face their own financial difficulties now.

Ms. Li has dismissed her nanny and started cooking for herself.

“My husband and I are under great pressure and often can’t sleep all night” worrying about the factory, she said. “I don’t know the future, I’m so confused, I don’t know how long it can last.”

The Australian government on Friday outlined a cautious, three-step plan to reopen the country by July, with states and territories in control of the timeline.

“We cannot allow our fear of going backwards from stopping us from going forward,” said Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The plan’s tentative first stage will allow Australians to hold public gatherings of up to 10 people. Schools, playgrounds, some eateries and community centers will be allowed to reopen, with social distancing.

If all goes well, officials said, Australians may be allowed to travel between states and attend public gatherings up to 100 people by July. The plan will be reviewed every three weeks, and further outbreaks would most likely occur. But the country was committed to moving forward with the plan, Mr. Morrison said.

“If not now, then when?” he added. He encouraged Australians to download a government app aimed at contact tracing.

The country has now tested over 730,000 people for the virus, with 6,900 confirmed cases and 97 deaths.

The slow reopening was met with cautious support by many Australians. “I still feel the need to be super vigilant, especially with risk groups like my grandparents, said Desmond Cohn, 26, from Sydney, where some restrictions were relaxed and beaches were recently reopened for exercise.

The country also joined a meeting of countries on Thursday, led by Austria and including Greece, Israel, Denmark, Singapore, Norway, New Zealand and the Czech Republic, to compare strategies on reopening their economies. Australia has called for an independent inquiry into the origin of the pandemic, which has caused frictions with its largest trading partner, China. “We just want to know what happened so it doesn’t happen again,” Mr. Morrison said on Friday.

The European Union faces new embarrassment and criticism over its clumsy efforts to stay on the good side of China while promoting itself as a defender of transparency and the rule of law.

The censored material in both cases referred to China as the source of the new coronavirus, an increasingly neuralgic issue for China’s leader, Xi Jinping. The Communist Party’s propaganda department has been orchestrating a fierce counterattack against the idea, claiming that the truth is still unclear and even suggesting the U.S. military was the true source.

The European Union defended the first case, asserting that there were always two versions, one for internal consumption and one for the public, but admitted that China pushed hard to alter an early, leaked version.

Mr. Chapuis is widely regarded by critics as soft on China.

As a sign of displeasure, the Beijing embassies of Germany, France and Italy published the full letter.

Virginie Battu-Henriksson, a spokeswoman for the European Union, said that Mr. Chapuis had acted “with considerable reluctance” but said: “This decision, taken under great time pressure, was not the right one to take,” and “this has been made clear to the ambassador.”

Reinhard Bütikofer, chief of the European Parliament’s delegation to China, called for Mr. Chapuis to be fired. “If the ambassador has indeed decided on his own responsibility to accept the censorship, then he is the wrong man for the job and must leave,” Mr. Bütikofer said.

An earthquake with the magnitude of 5.1 shook Tehran around 1 a.m. on Friday, with at least 20 aftershocks sending thousands of panicked residents into the streets.

Tehran residents have been struggling to manage the threat of the coronavirus pandemic for over two months, and Friday’s quake saw people crowding together fearfully in the aftermath.

There were no casualties reported in Tehran but in Damavand, the epicenter of the quake about 6.2 miles northeast of Tehran, a 60-year-old man died and eight others were injured. There were no immediate reports of buildings or hospitals being damaged, said Tehran’s governor, Anoushirvan Mohseni-Bandpey.

The government’s management of the pandemic has drawn criticism from Iranians who are anxious over the lack of a strict lockdown order. Health officials said this week that the pandemic is still spreading, with a steady increase in numbers in at least 15 provinces.

The quake hit when most people were at home sleeping or watching television. Videos shared on social media showed the moment when walls began rattling and people ran for their doors.

Eyewitnesses in Tehran said streets were packed with people standing around on sidewalks, huddled in parks and camping outside for the night. Some people wore masks but many did not observe social distancing in the chaos of trying to take shelter outdoors.

“There are thousands of people outside, it’s even more crowded than daylight here,” Pooriya Asteraky, a resident of Tehran, said in a telephone interview.

Around Tehran, people were sleeping in their parked cars along the sides of roads, fearful of going back inside.

“People should be on high alert and observe health protocols related to the coronavirus when they come out of the house,” Mr. Mohseni-Bandpey said in a TV broadcast.

Jan Langlo, the theater’s manager, said in a telephone interview that he expected the evening’s two planned screenings of classic films to sell out.

“But then again,” he said, “capacity is only 50 people, so it’s not hard.”

Around 50 of the country’s 204 theaters are expected to reopen, said Guttorm Petterson, the director of Film & Kino, a trade group, in a telephone interview. And like so many industries reopening in the wake of the pandemic, they have had to reimagine what their theaters will look like with the coronavirus still a major concern.

Movie screenings never really went away during lockdown, Mr. Petterson added, with major chains and amateurs setting up drive-in theaters across the country. That showed there was demand for the reopening, he added.

Guidelines from Norway’s health ministry say moviegoers must stay one meter apart, or around three feet. Mr. Langlo said his theater would allow people to sit in every second row, and would keep two empty seats between each individual or group.

Tim Richards, the chief executive of Vue Cinemas, a chain that operates in nine European countries, said in a telephone interview that he hoped all his movie theaters would reopen by the end of June.

Some countries are likely to require temperature checks before customers are admitted, he added. Vue is already doing such checks at its theaters in Taiwan.

Most of Norway’s theaters are run by local governments, Mr. Petterson noted, so some are reopening even though they will lose money.

“They want to be there for the community,” he said.

Not waiting for state action, Russia’s oligarchs have become central to the coronavirus fight.

A Russian steel magnate had his company supply respirator masks for the police, ventilators for hospitals, housing for people in isolation, software for quarantine compliance and workers for lockdown patrols.

The fantastically rich oligarchs who own Russia’s biggest businesses have become central figures in the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

With local health systems buckling, some oligarchs are deploying millions of dollars of their own cash, along with their companies’ logistics and procurement capacity, while urging slow-moving regional authorities to act with more resolve.

Under President Vladimir V. Putin, oligarchs have depended on the Kremlin’s benevolence, and the pandemic illustrates how much Mr. Putin’s system of governance relies on informal alliances with business tycoons.

So people like the steel magnate, Alexei A. Mordashov, have stepped in. He helped persuade regional governors to shut down the cities where he operates, and provided resources to make it happen.

For a fertilizer tycoon, Andrei A. Guryev, closing off the isolated Siberian region around one of his operations was simpler — his company owns the local airport and the ski resort.

The drop in airline travel caused by the pandemic has sharply reduced the amount of atmospheric data routinely gathered by commercial airliners, the World Meteorological Organization has said.

The agency said Thursday that it was “concerned about the increasing impact” on forecasts worldwide.

Data on temperature, wind and humidity, collected by sensors on the planes and transmitted in real time to forecasting organizations around the world, has been cut by nearly 90 percent in some regions, the meteorological organization said.

The organization, an arm of the United Nations that coordinates a global observing system for 193 member nations, said surface-based weather observations had also been affected in some parts of the world, including Africa and Central and South America. Many weather instruments there are not automated and must be visited regularly to obtain readings.

National weather agencies “are facing increasingly severe challenges as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, especially in developing countries,” the agency’s director-general, Petteri Taalas, said, in a statement.

“As we approach the Atlantic hurricane season, the Covid-19 pandemic poses an additional challenge, and may exacerbate multi-hazard risks at a single country level,” he said.

Reporting and research were contributed by Hannah Beech, Nick Cumming-Bruce, Azam Ahmed, Elian Peltier, Aurelien Breeden, Monika Pronczuk, Elaine Yu, Abdi Latif Dahir, Steven Erlanger, Isabella Kwai, Jeffrey Gettleman, Suhasini Raj, Alex Marshall, Keith Bradsher, Liu Yi, Liz Alderman, Adam Satariano, Farnaz Fassihi, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Michael Levenson, Michael Crowley, Michael D. Shear, Anton Troianovski, Henry Fountain and Victor Mather.