10 August 1993

TOGA COARE Upperair Data

The files in this directory contain upperair observations from
the NMC decode of standard GTS realtime transmissions.  This
directory is a temporary test setup for distribution of data
taken during the TOGA-COARE period, November 1992 - February 1993.
All data in the NMC decode for the region 30S to 30N and 90E to
160W were selected for these files.  Note that NMC longitudes
are given in degrees west.  Some observations, especially for
stations in blocks 97 and 98 are known to be missing from the
NMC decode.

Each data file contains data for one month and one data type.
"aft" files contain aircraft reports, "sat" files contain satellite
winds, and "upa" files contain station data (including ships).
Files may be standard UNIX compressed (.Z) to save space and reduce
transmission time.

The files ending in "inv" contain one line for each report in
the corresponding data file.  The line contains station number,
year, month, day, synoptic hour, actual ob hour, report type,
number of mandatory levels, signficant levels, winds by height,
and winds by pressure.  This information can be used directly to
access quality and completeness of a particular station or it could
be further processed to produce more concise inventories.  Within
each monthly file, each station appears in time series order.

The file "format_on29" is a detailed description of the data format.
Most details of the format are handled by the read program "adpupa.f".
The data files differ slightly from the format description in that
each report is one ASCII record.  The format description contains
information on units, report types, quality flags, etc.

Data for other periods and areas are available for cost of copying from
the Data Support Section (joseph@ncar.ucar.edu or datahelp@ncar.ucar.edu).