Abstract
Abstract. As the 2015/2016 El Niño was gathering strength in late 2015, scientists at the Earth System Research Laboratory's Physical Sciences Division proposed and led the implementation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) El Niño Rapid Response (ENRR) Field Campaign. ENRR observations included wind and thermodynamic profiles of the atmosphere over the near-equatorial eastern central Pacific Ocean, many of which were collected from two field sites and transmitted in near-real time for inclusion in global forecasting models. From 26 January to 28 March 2016, twice-daily rawinsonde observations were made from Kiritimati (pronounced Christmas) Island (2.0° N, 157.4° E; call sign CXENRR). From 16 February to 16 March 2016, three to eight radiosondes were launched each day from NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown (allocated call sign WTEC) as it travelled southeast from Hawaii to service Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) buoys along longitudes 140 and 125° W and then north to San Diego, California. Both the rapid and remote nature of these deployments created particular difficulties in collecting and disseminating the soundings; these are described together with the methods used to reprocess the data after the field campaign finished. The reprocessed and lightly quality-controlled data have been put into an easy-to-read text format, qualifying them to be termed Level 2 soundings. They are archived and freely available for public access at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in the form of two separate data sets: one consisting of 125 soundings from Kiritimati (https://doi.org/10.7289/V55Q4T5K), the other of 193 soundings from NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown (https://doi.org/10.7289/V5X63K15). Of the Kiritimati soundings, 94 % reached the tropopause and 88 % reached 40 hPa, while 89 % of the ship's soundings reached the tropopause and 87 % reached 40 hPa. The soundings captured the repeated advance and retreat of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) at Kiritimati, a variety of marine tropospheric environments encountered by the ship, and lower-stratospheric features of the 2015–2016 QBO (quasi-biennial oscillation), all providing a rich view of the local atmosphere's response to the eastern central Pacific's extremely warm waters during the 2015/16 El Niño.
Highlights
In early 2015, signs of a long-anticipated El Niño event began to appear in the Pacific Ocean
Both the “research mode” and “non-research mode” sets of text sounding files as well as the BUFR and TEMP messages were uploaded to Boulder, from whence the TEMP messages were pushed to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)’s Central Operations for transmission to the Global Telecommunication System (GTS)
Users working with the data from Kiritimati, especially those interacting with residents and local meteorological data collections, may want to be aware that in terms of civil time Kiritimati is in the Line Island Time (LINT) time zone (UTC + 14)
Summary
In early 2015, signs of a long-anticipated El Niño event began to appear in the Pacific Ocean. Both dynamical and statistical models were forecasting the continuation and likely strengthening of El Niño conditions in June 2015 (Climate Prediction Center (CPC) and International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), 2015a). The El Niño Rapid Response (ENRR) program was instituted as a joint effort by both operational and research-oriented sectors within the NOAA. The resulting ENRR Field Campaign, led by PSD but involving many partners within and outside of the NOAA, had several observational and research components, including hundreds of atmospheric profiles of temperature, humidity and winds measured by radiosondes launched from Kiritimati (pronounced “Christmas”) Island and NOAA Ship Ronald H. This paper documents the collection of these soundings, their reprocessing with improved surface data, the initial quality control applied, and the resulting data sets
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