Mobile GPS radiosondes from Colorado State University for the Mesoscale Predictability Experiment (MPEX)

15 October 2013

PI: Russ Schumacher, Colorado State University 
e-mail: russ.schumacher@colostate.edu
Mailing address: 1371 Campus Delivery, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1371
Phone: 970.491.8084

1.0 Dataset overview

This dataset consists of atmospheric soundings collected from a mobile platform by the Colorado State University team during MPEX.  Data span the period from 16 May--14 June 2013.  Soundings were taken intermittently as determined by the weather situation, with a focus on the pre-convective and convectively disturbed environments near deep convective storms in the central United States.  Sounding collection (launch times and locations, etc.) was coordinated with Purdue University and NSSL teams.  More information about MPEX can be found at: http://www.eol.ucar.edu/field_projects/mpex   

2.0 Instrument Description

The soundings were taken with Vaisala RS-92 radiosondes and processed using a Digicora MW21 system running V3.64 software. 

3.0 Data collection and processing

Soundings were collected from a mobile platform in locations in the pre-convective and convectively disturbed environments near deep convective storms in the central United States.  The primary data quality control and assurance was automatically performed by the Vaisala Digicora software.  This includes corrections for the standard known biases of the instrument.  At this time, no correction/adjustment has been made to these data to reconcile them with the InterMet sondes used by other groups during MPEX.

4.0 Data format

For each sounding, three files are provided, which were produced by the Vaisala Digicora software. 

-- "TSV": Raw data, as well as the position of the sonde in Lat/Lon/altitude and time from launch.  Column delimited ASCII format, with the column headings given in the files.

-- "EDT": Edited data from the Digicora software at pressure levels, with corrections for the standard known biases of the instrument.  Column delimited ASCII format, with the column headings given in the files.  These files were edited to include the latitude and longitude of the launch site for each sounding.

-- "PNG": Portable network graphics files showing Skew-T log-p diagrams of the soundings, along with standard convective parameters (CAPE, shear, etc.)

5.0 Data remarks

-- The CSU mobile sounding unit did not have a high-quality surface mesonet station associated with it.  As a result, the surface observations used along with the soundings were manually entered for each sounding, taking into account the readings from a handheld weather station and the most recent observation from the nearest regular ASOS/AWOS/METAR surface station.  

-- The TSV file for the sounding from 2349 UTC 16 May 2013 is missing.  The lat/lon of the launch site given in the EDT file is correct.

-- A few of the soundings were terminated early, either because of software/hardware malfunctions, dangerous launch conditions, or the desire to move to a different launch site.  Data are included for all portions of the soundings that were collected.

-- The sonde launched at 2241 UTC 31 May 2013 appears to have gone into a supercell thunderstorm and possibly that storm's mesocyclone; these data are not representative of the larger environment.