The Historical Arctic Rawinsonde Archive
The Historical Arctic Rawinsonde Archive (HARA) contains over 1.2 million
rawinsonde ascents, vertical soundings of temperature, pressure,
moisture and wind from fixdc-position (mostly land) stations north
of 65 degrees North latitude. For some stations, particularly
North America, the record begins as early as 1948. The data base is
archived in ASCII files on cdrom.
The database was assembled from five original archives obtained
from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder,
Colorado, and the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville,
North Carolina. The archive contains sounding data for 95 individual
stations (see figure below), including 50 stations in the Russian Arctic.
Records of at least 5 yr in length are available for 80 stations; records
of at least 10 yr are available for 69 stations.
Access Information
The HARA is being distributed by the National Snow and Ice Data
Center in Boulder, Colorado. Information on how to obtain the
data set is available
here.
Reference
Kahl, J.D., M.C. Serreze, S. Shiotani, S.M. Skony and R.C. Schnell,
1992: In situ meteorological sounding archives for Arctic studies.
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Soceity, 73,
1824-1830. View article (pdf)
Locations of routinely-reporting, fixed-position stations contained in the Historical Arctic
Rawinsonde Archive. This archive is an extensive collection (over one million soundings) of Arctic
upper-air meteorological data during the period 1948-1987). Symbols denote the number of years
(NYR) for which data are available.
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