Introduction
This data was collected from the Stratosphere-Troposphere Exchange Project (STEP) conducted onboard the NASA ER-2 aircraft in January and February, 1987 based in Darwin, Australia. This mission was the last of 6 STEP missions which began with the Global Tropospheric Experiment (GTE) in April 1984.
The Darwin, Australia phase of STEP utilized 15 instruments and accessed the world's highest, coldest tropopause as well as the largest penetrating cumulonimbus anvils. The flights were designed to test a dehydration mechanism proposed by Danielsen (1982), as well as to acquire sufficient data to test and develop other hypotheses.
The STEP missions were designed to investigate different aspects of stratosphere-troposphere exchange (in mass, trace gases, and aerosols), including cloud-free and cloud-dominated mechanisms in both the mid-latitudes and the tropics. STEP was carried out under NASA and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Data Access
The data are held on CD-ROM at the BADC and are available for browsing purposes. If you want to use the data in earnest you should order a copy of the CD from one of the contact addresses listed below.
Data availability and file format
All files within this release are standard MS-DOS ASCII files with variable length records . In general, the file naming convention uses a two character prefix to identify the measurement, followed by a six digit number giving the year, month, and day (GMT) of the flight. The extension should have a letter indicating the flight number for that day allowing for the possibility of multiple flights in a day and a flight data sequence number.
Documentation and Links to further information and references
The documentation on the CD-ROM has been extracted, indexed and made available through this interface. This gives an outline of the campaign, an inventory of the data on the CD and a detailed description of the data format.
There is a special issue of Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) (volume 98, number D5, 1993) devoted to the STEP Tropical campaign. A paper by Russell et al. in that issue contains an overview of the mission and its objectives.
We also provide a list of other references.
You may also wish to visit the STEP Homepage, which includes information about the aircraft payload.
Citation
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA Ames Research Center, [Gaines, S.; Hipskind, S.]. Stratosphere-Troposphere Exchange Project (STEP), [Internet]. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1988, Date of citation. Available from http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/view/badc.nerc.ac.uk__ATOM__dataent_STEP
Who to contact
If you would like to obtain a copy of the CD-ROM you should contact Steven Gaines or Steve Hipskind at the NASA Ames Research Center.
General queries about the data should be directed to the BADC support line. If you have queries about specific experiments, contacts for their Principal Investigators are listed in the documentation on the CD-ROM.
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