Merged sounding VAP version 2.0
Authors
David D. Turner — NOAA- Global Systems Laboratory
Michael Jensen — Brookhaven National Laboratory
Larry M. Miloshevich — National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
David T. Troyan — Brookhaven National Laboratory
Category
Atmospheric State & Surface
Description
The merged sounding Value-Added Product (VAP) has been in the ARM and ASR pipeline since 2001. Output datastreams have been added to the Evaluation Products section of the ARM website for the past five years. Currently, there are data for all of the ARM fixed sites and all deployments of the Mobile Facility. 53 years of merged sounding data is available as an evaluation product. The process of moving all data to the ARM Data Archive has been started and will be completed shortly.
A second version of the merged sounding VAP was developed to address several concerns: (1) Vaisala radiosondes have inherent problems obtaining an accurate measurement of relative humidity, (2) the profile can be extended from 20 km to 60 km above ground level based upon the height achieved by ECMWF profiles, and (3) ECMWF temperatures require adjustments at high altitude (between 1 mb and 100 mb). Solutions to these issues have been incorporated in the new version of this VAP.
Along with producing that second version of merged sounding, a secondary datastream—Sonde Adjust—was created. This VAP incorporates any humidity corrections to the Vaisala RS-80, RS-90, and RS-92 radiosondes. The algorithms used to perform these corrections are documented by Wang et. al. (2002), Turner et. al. (2003), and Miloshevich et. al. (2004, 2009).
