Legacy Atmospheric Sounding Data Set Project

For nearly half a century, field experiments have been conducted from the tropics to the polar regions involving intensive observations of atmosphere, ocean, and land processes over selected locations of interest around the globe. The atmospheric component of field program data sets that tends to have the greatest long-term value to the science community is that provided by atmospheric sounding systems. These observations are used most commonly for diagnostic studies for the development of cloud parameterizations for weather and climate models, and calibration and validation of independent data sets. Many of these data are also used in special model reanalysis efforts. Upper-air data sets from field programs are generally of higher quality because the large suite of instruments deployed in these field campaigns allows for cross-calibration that can greatly enhance data accuracy. With the passing of time, there is a danger that some of these datasets will be difficult to find.

Due to the usefulness and importance of these sounding datasets and in consideration to the enormous investment to collect them, a collaborative data stewardship effort involving the Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU) is underway to:

1. Identify past field programs for which central collections of sounding data do not exist,
2. Track down existing holdings of sounding data for those field programs, to the extent they exist, at centers, laboratories, and universities,
3. Extract sounding data that are found on old storage media (i.e., 9-track tapes, printouts, etc.), and place into a consistent, easily-read, digital format,
4. Carry out standard quality control of the sounding data including objective gross limit and vertical consistency checks, and
5. Prepare a catalog and a central, publicly accessible archive of the sounding data (probably at NCAR and/or NCDC).

Reports and documentation from the BOMEX project. Photo courtesy Steve Williams.

The table below is a lists of field programs with upper-air sonde datasets. This list is incomplete with missing entries and datasets that have not be located. A question mark in a table entry indicates that a dataset was known to exist but has not been located. The entry "digital" means the dataset has been located in an ASCII digital form, whereas "digital coded" means the dataset has been located in digital form which we have not yet been able to decode (e.g., binary EBCDIC). As additional information becomes available, this table will be updated and corrected with links provided to each dataset.

We are requesting the assistance of the atmospheric science community to help us in this process, and in particular, to locate missing datasets which are in ASCII digital form. Though our primary interest is in upper-air sonde data, as other supporting datasets and/or documentation are found (e.g., surface, aircraft, radar) links will provided to these as well. An active link under the experiment name indicates that a web page has been set up with additional information on that field program.

Please use the information below this table to contact us: eol-archive@ucar.edu.