High Resolution Upper Air Sounding Data from Ships

Brief Description

These data were made available by NASA. For IOP1 and IOP2 there were 154 high resolution soundings taken on the Shiyan 3 (nominal position at 20.4N, 116.9E) and 152 soundings taken on the Kexue 1 (nominal position at 6.3N, 110E). These data are from Vaisala GPS radiosondes using a H-humicap humidity sensor. These data have not been quality controlled.

Steps to access and read gridded data files:

1. See Accessing the Data below which allows you to view available files and click on the files you want to to download
2. untar files: (e.g., tar xvf hires_upa_kexue.tar)
3. unzip compressed files: (e.g., gunzip *.zip), where zip is a compression and file packaging utility for Unix, VMS, MSDOS, OS/2, Windows NT, ect.




Accessing the Data

Click here to view and download the ship sounding datasets. Report any problems in accessing the data to Paul Ciesielski at paulc@atmos.colostate.edu .

At this location, you will find three files:

- README (data information most of which is contained here)
- hires_upa_shiyan3.tar (Shiyan 3 sounding data)
- hires_upa_kexue1.tar  (Kexue 1  sounding data)

Notes:

The sounding software on each of the ships was slightly different such that the data files described below are different.

Upon unzipping the Kexue 1 sounding data at each time one will find two files: (mmddyyhh.MSG and mmddyyhh.txt, mm-month, dd-date, yy-year, hh-UTC hour). The *.MSG file contains the GTS resolution coded message. The *.txt file contains the ~2 second temperature, humidity and wind data as function of height. Other pertinent information is included in the *.txt file.

Upon unzipping Shiyan 3 sounding data at each time one will find 5 files: mmdd_hh.bin which is a binary file generated by the sounding software, mmdd_hh.ptu which contains ~2 second temperature and humidity data as a function of height, mmdd_hh.win which contains ~2 second wind data as a function of height, mmdd_hhs.ptu which contains 10 second temperature and humidity data as a function of height, mmdd_hhs.win which contains 10 second wind data as a function of height. Note: the height data on these Shiyan files is 3 meters too high at all levels.