Met Office - Cardington Data

The BADC hold surface meteorological data and high resolution radiosonde data from the Met Office's Cardington site to assist in disseminating these data to the wider research community.

The surface and balloon facility is based at Cardington in Bedfordshire where a comprehensive suite of surface, sub-surface and mast-based instruments is kept permanently operating. Other instrumentation, including the balloon, can be deployed elsewhere in support of off-base measurement campaigns.

The research group at Cardington study boundary-layer meteorology and surface processes to help with the development of numerical weather prediction methods. The effectiveness of these methods is critically dependent on access to and analysis of high-quality observational data sets. These are used in a number of ways including the development of physical parameterisation schemes. The dataset contains recorded surface measurements timed at 1, 10 and 30 minute intervals.

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 application for access to the Met Office Cardington Data includes the Met Office Agreement to be completed online. Please note that the datasets are available for bona fide academic research only (sorry no undergraduates), on a per person per project basis (i.e. all members on a same project who will be using the data must individually apply for access to the data). If you require access to the Met Office data for commercial or personal purposes, please contact the Met Office directly.

Your application for accessing the Met Office Cardington data will be processed within a day of receipt and you will receive an email confirmation. Provided your application is complete and fully meets the Met Office conditions, a web account will be activated to allow you to access the Met Office Cardington data directories via your login account from the BADC WWW Browse Archive pages.

Information on the instruments and data formats of data produced at Cardington.

The surface data held at the BADC are stored in an ASCII format generated by the Met Office Cardington office while the high resolution radiosonde data are in the Vaisala "edt" format.

The following list are links to related data held at the BADC that may be of further interest to users of data from Cardington:

• MIDAS Land surface station data
• Met Office wind profiler data
• High resolution radiosonde data
• Global radiosonde data
• MST wind profiler data

UK Meteorological Office, Cardington, [McGregor, J.; Price, J.]. Met Office - Cardington Data, [Internet]. NCAS British Atmospheric Data Centre, 2006, Date of citation. Available from http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/view/badc.nerc.ac.uk__ATOM__dataent_cardington

If you have queries about these pages or about obtaining the Met Office Cardington 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 Team will carry out the work as quickly and efficiently as possible, and in any case, the user will be kept informed of progress. Alternatively, if you have specific questions about the data then please contact either James McGregor or Jeremy Price, both of whom are based on site at Cardington.