Launches of Vaisala RS-80 radiosondes during the cruise were undertaken by Chris Fairall and the on-board Environment Canada's ASAP van. SSEC policy for in-house use is to use CLASS sonde files.
An attempt was made to launch four synopic sondes each day at the hours 0Z, 6Z, 12Z and 18Z. Some of these scheduled flights do not appear in the sonde record because of unfavorable launching conditions, a declining helium and sonde supply towards the end of the cruise, or other problems. During intense research periods in the vicinity of Manus Island, up to four additional sondes were launched per day.
Two separate archives for the CLASS sondes exist. First, a set of ASCII files is available (5-mb interpolated data from the ship-board CLASS software); second, SSEC-compliant NETCDF files. The latter set has the advantage of being compatible with existing NETCDF processing software; however some parameters from the original file are not included.
There are also two separate archives of radiosonde profile gifs:
It is hoped that raw sonde files from data provided by Chris Fairall will be available before April 1997. These give higher spatial resolution than the currently available 5-mb interpolated data.
GO TO ASCII ARCHIVE (TABLE FORMAT) (includes individual GIF profiles)There are also additional text files available which are designed specifically for easy data ingestion by C code or graphing programs. These exclude bulky headers, navigation information and so forth.
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