DOCUMENTATION FOR THE DATA COLLECTED IN VORTEX2 BY THE NSSL MOBILE MESONET (OPERATED IN COLLABORATION WITH PSU) AND STRAKA MOBILE MESONET -------------------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT NOTE: DATASET UPDATED ON 2/1/2011 TO CORRECT AN ERRONEOUS OFFSET TO THE WIND DIRECTION. Each directory contains the mobile mesonet data for each vehicle for one day. Files ending in .qcd have been qcd; files ending in .qcd.bc have been qcd and also have had biases removed via instrument intercomparisons. The intercomparisons were done en route to a storm in precipitation-free, well-aspirated conditions, when vehicles were traveling together at highway speeds (all vehicles were within ~200 m of each other driving in single-file). The results of the intercomparisons for each day are written to a file called README.yymmdd.biases, and the graphical results of the intercomparisons (before the bias corrections were applied) also are included (yymmddintercomparison.ps). Mobile mesonet data recorded by the NSSL-PSU mobile mesonet (vehicle ID's P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, and P7) and Straka mobile mesonet (P8) are formatted as follows: id time lat lon Tfast Tslow RH p dir spd qc1 qc2 qc3 qc4 id: 2-character vehicle ID time: UTC time in decimal format lat: latitude in decimal format lon: longitude in decimal format Tfast: fast-response temperature in Celsius Tslow: slow-response temperature in Celsius (the response is slowed because the sensor is located with the RH probe inside a trapped volume enclosed by a microporous membrane that keeps the RH probe from being contaminated by pollutants) RH: relative humidity (%) p: pressure in millibars dir: wind direction in degrees spd: wind speed in m/s qc1: set to 1 if there's a data logger problem (possible radio frequency interference) qc2: set to 1 if wind data are contaminated by vehicle acceleration qc3: set to 1 if something in the data didn't pass an insanity check qc4: set to 1 if the vehicle is stationary, in which case temperature and RH data might be suspect owing to insufficient aspiration. For more information, contact Paul Markowski (pmarkowski@psu.edu) or Yvette Richardson (yrichardson@psu.edu). Also see Straka, J.M., E.N. Rasmussen, and S.E. Fredrickson, 1996: A mobile mesonet for finescale meteorological observations. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 13, 921-936.