RadioSonde (version 4.2)

ExampleSonde: Examples of radiosonde observations

Description

The R data frames sonde1 and sonde2 are examples of high resolution (vertical) soundings of the atmosphere. The balloons were launched on July 4, 2015 02:59:33 and 04:59:23 (UTC) as part of the PECAN field study lead by the National Center for Atmospheric Research ( see https://www.eol.ucar.edu/field_projects/pecan. Refer to the Data Access tab on the PECAN home page to download the data collected during this study where "upper air" indexes radiosonde observations. The interest in this close spacing was to compare how the vertical structure of the atmosphere changed at this location in the Northwest corner of Kansas (-101.370712,39.357468) over a short amount of time.

These data frames contain the following named components:

time	Time in seconds from the ballon's release, a numeric vector.
press	Pressure (mb), a numeric vector
temp	Dry-bulb Temperature (deg. C), a numeric vector
dewpt	Dew point temperaure (deg. C), a numeric vector
rh	Relative humidity (%), a numeric vector
uwind	East-West component of the wind, a numeric vector
vwind	North-South component of the wind, a numeric vector
wspd	wind speed (m/s), a numeric vector
dir	Wind direction, a numeric vector
dz	rate of ascent in m/s
lon	Longitude, a numeric vector
lat	Latitude, a numeric vector
az	azimuth (angle along horizon), a numeric vector
alt	altitude (m), a numeric vector
qp	QC flag for pressure, a numeric vector
qt	QC flag for temperature, a numeric vector
qh	QC flag for humidity, a numeric vector
qu	QC flag for U component, a numeric vector
qv	QC flag for V component, a numeric vector
quv	QC flag for ascension rate, a numeric vector

Details

Raw ( ascii/text) data files are in the github RadioSonde R package repository https://github.com/dnychka/Radiosonde. along with the R script that converts to a data frame useful in R. The NCAR/PECAN original data files are those ending in the extention .eol and are the standard format for radiosonde profiles collected by this lab. Note that in this proccess the original variable names were converted to those used in this package. E.g. Press changes to press. Also the metadata units that are in the header of the original file is included as an attribute in the R versions.

Examples

# NOT RUN {
data(sonde1)

# look at the metadata
cat( attributes( sonde1)$metaData, fill=TRUE)

# and the units
cat( attributes( sonde1)$units, fill=TRUE)


skewtPlot( sonde1, winds=TRUE)

data(sonde2)
# skewt with wind barbs. 

skewtPlot( sonde1, sonde2, winds=TRUE)
# }