Abstract
Abstract. The Organization of Tropical East Pacific Convection (OTREC) field campaign investigated the dynamical structure of convection in the tropical east Pacific and Caribbean. One of the central data sets for this field campaign is the thermodynamic structure of the atmosphere measured by dropsondes released from the NSF/NCAR G-V research aircraft. Between 7 August and 2 October 2019, 648 dropsondes were successfully released from 22 research flights. Soundings were launched in a grid pattern with a typical spacing of 1∘ longitude and 1.2∘ latitude and provided profiles of pressure, temperature, humidity, and winds between the surface and on average 13.3 km. Of these soundings, 636 provided complete vertical profiles of all parameters with a nominal vertical resolution between 6 to 12 m from the surface to almost flight altitude. OTREC deployed the new NRD41 dropsonde, which is the most advanced model that has been developed at NCAR. Here, we describe the data set, the processing of the measurements, and general statistics of all dropsonde observations. The data set is available at https://doi.org/10.26023/EHRT-TN96-9W04 (UCAR/NCAR and Vömel, 2019).
Highlights
The Organization of Tropical East Pacific Convection (OTREC) field campaign (Fuchs-Stone et al, 2020) was conducted to study the distribution of deep atmospheric convection in the tropical eastern Pacific
The NCAR AVAPS dropsonde system deployed in OTREC used the automated dropsonde launcher on board the National Science Foundation (NSF)/NCAR G-V and the newly developed NCAR Research Dropsonde model NRD41
Standard quality control (QC) in near real time and as part of the final data QC is based on the algorithms implemented in the Atmospheric Sounding Processing ENvironment (ASPEN) software
Summary
The Organization of Tropical East Pacific Convection (OTREC) field campaign (Fuchs-Stone et al, 2020) was conducted to study the distribution of deep atmospheric convection in the tropical eastern Pacific. The NCAR AVAPS dropsonde system deployed in OTREC used the automated dropsonde launcher on board the NSF/NCAR G-V and the newly developed NCAR Research Dropsonde model NRD41 This dropsonde uses the pressure, temperature, and humidity sensor of the Vaisala RS41 radiosonde and employs an improved version of the GPS, telemetry, and parachute release system of the previous NRD94 dropsonde, which was in use between 2011 and 2018. The automated dropsonde launcher was installed in the baggage compartment of the NSF/NCAR G-V and remotely controlled from the AVAPS station on board the aircraft This allowed dropsonde operations up to a maximum altitude of 14.9 km while providing easy access to the launcher in case of malfunction. The dropsonde launcher performed as expected, and no further dropsonde release problems were encountered
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