The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility has a new data product to make it easier for users to work with measurements from its tethered balloon system (TBS) missions.
The TBS normally operates below the lowest cloud base, where it measures temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, turbulence, and aerosol properties. ARM’s new Tethered Balloon System Merged (TBSMERGED) product combines these data sets with ground-based ceilometer data, allowing for examination of cloud-base and boundary-layer heights.
TBSMERGED evaluation data are available from TBS flights at the following ARM sites:
- the Southern Great Plains (SGP) Central Facility near Lamont, Oklahoma, between April 25, 2019, and April 26, 2022.
- Guy, Texas, between June 3 and September 14, 2022, as part of the TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER)
- Gothic, Colorado, between September 21, 2021, and July 27, 2022, as part of the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) campaign.
ARM has also produced an in-cloud version of the merged product (TBSMERGEDINCLOUD), which combines the same types of data sets as the standard version but will include measurements of airborne supercooled liquid water content. In-cloud evaluation data are currently available from TBS flights between April 9, 2017, and November 19, 2020, at Oliktok Point, Alaska. Supercooled liquid water content data from Oliktok Point are expected to be available later in 2023.
More information about these data can be found on the TBSMERGED web page.
Access all TBSMERGED data in the ARM Data Center. (Go here to create an account to download the data.)
For questions, feedback, or to report data issues, please contact Dari Dexheimer, ARM’s lead TBS instrument mentor.
To cite the SGP, TRACER, and SAIL data, please use doi:10.5439/1862017. The Oliktok Point data can be referenced as doi:10.5439/1862018.