Met Office - UK and European Radiosonde Data (1990 - June 1998)

- DATASET NO LONGER IN USE -
Please go to http://www.badc.rl.ac.uk/data/radiosglobe/ for information on upper-air data from European stations.

Introduction

This dataset consists of radiosonde data from 165 stations of the European upper air network. Countries include the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Italy. For a full list, see the station list. A Global radiosonde data set is available from 1997 onwards. All UK and European Radiosonde stations are now included in this dataset which is updated daily.

The data comprise vertical profiles of temperature, dew-point temperature, relative humidity, humidity mixing ratio, wind speed and wind direction at standard and significant pressure levels. The standard pressure levels are 1000, 925, 850, 700, 500, 400, 300, 250, 200, 150, 100, 70, 50, 30, 20 and 10 mb. Significant pressure levels are calculated according to the Met Office criteria and constitute levels at which significant events occur in the profile for example turning points.

The period of coverage is 1990 to June 1998. Stations conduct ascents up to four times daily at the synoptic hours of 00, 06, 12, 18 GMT.

Restricted Data Access

The Met Office wish to monitor the use of this data and require an acknowledgement of the data source if they are used in any publication. The online application for access to the Met Office Radiosonde data includes the Met Office Agreement to be electronically signed. Please note that the Met Office data sets are available for bona fide academic research only (sorry no undergraduates). If you wish to access the Met Office data for commercial or personal purposes, please contact the Met Office directly..

Your application for accessing the Met Office Radiosonde data will be processed within a day of receipt. Provided your application is complete and fully meets the Met Office conditions, a web account will be activated to allow you access to the Met Office Radiosonde data directories via your login account from the BADC WWW Browse Archive pages.
Please read the 00README file available under /badc/ukmo-rad/ directory to to guide you through the tree structure and the data directory.

Data File Format

The data held at the BADC, are stored in a simple ASCII format (plain text and "human" readable).

A simple data file format has been adopted. Note that the data format for the Global radiosonde dataset is slightly different (see Global Radiosonde file format).

Documentation

The BADC provides a comprehensive help file which contains background information to help you use the Met Office radiosonde station data held at the BADC.

Links to Further Information

Additional January and February 1997 Radiosonde data can be obtained from the FASTEX (Fronts and Atlantic Storm Track EXperiment) Central Data Archive via the web at http://www.cnrm.meteo.fr:8000/dbfastex/.

High resolution radiosonde data (2 seconds interval data) is also available for Aberporth in Wales.

The Met Office maintains web pages on EUMETNET (Rawinsonde Network Information, Operational problems and Research and Development) and individual member countries.

Who to Contact

If you have queries about these pages or about obtaining the Met Office european radiosonde data from the BADC then you should contact BADC Support. Your query should be answered within one working day. When follow-up work is required, the BADC support will carry out the work as quickly and efficiently as possible, and in any case, the user will be kept informed of progress.

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