Ship- And island-based atmospheric soundings from the 2020 EUREC4A field campaign

Abstract

To advance the understanding of the interplay among clouds, convection, and circulation, and its role in climate change, the Elucidating the role of clouds-circulation coupling in climate campaign (EUREC4A) and Atlantic Tradewind Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Interaction Campaign (ATOMIC) collected measurements in the western tropical Atlantic during January and February 2020. Upper-air radiosondes were launched regularly (usually 4-hourly) from a network consisting of the Barbados Cloud Observatory (BCO) and four ships within 6-16°N, 51-60°W. From 8 January to 19 February, a total of 811 radiosondes measured wind, temperature, and relative humidity. In addition to the ascent, the descent was recorded for 82 % of the soundings. The soundings sampled changes in atmospheric pressure, winds, lifting condensation level, boundary layer depth, and vertical distribution of moisture associated with different ocean surface conditions, synoptic variability, and mesoscale convective organization. Raw (Level 0), quality-controlled 1 s (Level 1), and vertically gridded (Level 2) data in NetCDF (Stephan et al., 2020) are available to the public at AERIS (https://doi.org/10.25326/137 https://doi.org/10.25326/137). The methods of data collection and post-processing for the radiosonde data set are described here.