Collaborations for improved atmospheric humidity and temperature profiles

Description

At a data management workshop held in September 2009, agreement between U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), the Global Change Observing System (GCOS) Reference Upper Air Network (GRUAN) lead center, and the Lindenberg Meteorological Observatory in Germany, was reached on a data management strategy for the GRUAN. GRUAN is envisaged as a network of 30–40 high-quality, long-term, upper-air observing stations, building on existing observational networks expected to provide long-term, highly accurate measurements of the atmospheric profile. The DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility will concurrently launch cryogenic frost-point hygrometers (CFH) and the ARM standard rawinsondes. The resulting data product will provide ARM users with improved humidity profiles in the upper regions of the troposphere and lower regions of the stratosphere. NCDC will provide (as budgets allow) the incremental funding required to conduct GRUAN operations (e.g., expendables such as CFH radiosondes and other related materials) at the 7 U.S. GRUAN sites (including all five ARM sites). In return, the ARM Facility will process Vaisala (RS-92) rawinsonde data from all GRUAN sites (currently 15) and send the ARM-processed data to the Lindenberg Meteorological Observatory where error bars will be determined from individual site metadata and added to the individual data files. This GRUAN-branded rawinsonde will be archived at NCDC and made freely available to all users. The significance of this agreement is twofold: it allows rawinsonde data from 15 different worldwide sites to be directly comparable, and it will be the first time that a major observational network will provide error bars as part of its data. This activity is expected to begin mid-FY2010.