DYCOMS-II Upper Air: 915 MHz Profiler Point Loma, California Wind Profile Imagery (GIF) 1.0 General Information The 915 MHz Profiler Point Loma, California Wind Profile Imagery (GIF) is one of several upper air products collected as part of the Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus Phase II: Entrainment Studies (DYCOMS-II) project field catalog operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research/Joint Office for Science Support (UCAR/JOSS; http://www.joss.ucar.edu/dycoms/catalog/). There is one image available per day which includes each hourly wind profile for the day. The products cover the period from 1 - 31 July 2001 (except for 17-24 July when the wind profiler was down). The products were acquired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) (http://oak.fsl.noaa.gov/blp/displays/blpus.html). All images are in GIF format. 2.0 Data Contact Scot Loehrer (loehrer@ucar.edu) 3.0 Product Information Boundary layer profilers (BLP) are small, relatively low-cost UHF Doppler radars used primarily to measure vertical profiles of horizontal winds. The BLPs have a minimum range of about 100 m above ground level (AGL), with range resolutions selectable from 60 m to 400 m. Depending on the configuration of the radar, and the atmospheric conditions, BLPs are capable of measuring wind up to about 3 km AGL. With the addition of an optional Radio Acoustic Sounding System (RASS), virtual temperature profiles up to about 1 km can also be obtained. The winds displayed at each height are averaged over the preceding hour, e.g., subhourly data processed between 1600-1700 UTC would be averaged and displayed with the time stamp of 1700 UTC. The displayed winds have all "passed" our single-station quality control requirements (continuity in height and time, and a requirement that good vertical beam data is present) and typically represent high quality data. RASS temperatures follow the same time stamp convention and have also passed single-station quality control. 3.1 Station List Station Name State ID Lat Lon Elev (m) -------------------------------------------------------- Point Loma CA PTLCA 32.70 -117.25 23 The Point Loma profiler and RASS is operated by the San Diego Air Pollution Control District. 4.0 Quality Control Procedures UCAR/JOSS conducted no quality checks on these data. 5.0 File Naming Convention The file names are structured as follows: profile_wind.yyyymmddhhmm.point_loma_ca.gif Where profile_wind is the data type yyyy is the four digit year mm is the two digit month dd is the two digit day hh is the hour (UTC) mm is the minute point_loma is the name of the data set 6.0 References None