Ozonesonde Data

Data Access Page

The Huntsville, Alabama ozonesonde station is collaborative effort between the Earth System Science Center (ESSC)/Atmospheric Science Department of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and the NOAA Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory. The station commenced operations in April of 1999, with the aim of establishing a long-term data set of weekly vertical ozone profiles in the Southeastern United States.

The Huntsville Ozonesonde Station is located in Northern Alabama, about 100 miles south of Nashville, TN and 90 miles north of Birmingham, AL. The coordinates at the station are, 35.28 N 86.59 W, at an elevation of 196 msl. Ozonesondes are launched every Saturday at 1300 LT, from the Johnson Research Center on the UAH campus, with occasional high-frequency launch experiments. The station has participated in the Southern Oxidants Study field intensive in the Nashville metropolitan area in 1999 and at the Texas Air Quality study (TEXAQS2000) in Houston, Texas in the summer of 2000. In both campaigns, the Huntsville ozonesonde station participated with daily ozonesondes at 1300 LT. Data from these two studies are also available for download at this site.

It is the intention of ESSC/UAH and NOAA/CMDL to make this data available to the research community, and we ask that you register your organization, so we can maintain a record of data usage for our reference. The Huntsville ozonesonde data will also be available for ftp as part of the World Ozone and Ultraviolet Data Center (WOUDC) dataset.

The Huntsville ozonesonde data is currently available in the CMDL L100, 100 m resolution format (an example of the data files is provided here) as well as WOUDC (csv) and PDF format.

Also available is an IDL routine to read the L100 data. The routine reads the data files into individual arrays containing variables such as altitude, pressure, temperature, dew point, relative humidity, ozone pressure, ozone mixing ratio, and ozone number density among others. The routine is well annotated and can be made to output plots, or write data to a file in a user-defined format with little modification.

The Huntsville ozonesonde data set will be updated on a monthly basis.