Observations from Radio Acoustic Sounding Systems.
Hourly observations from around 120 RASS stations distributed globally.
Data are extracted daily at around 00 UT for the previous day's coverage and delivered to the BADC at around 0200 UT.
Ingest scripts run at the BADC every 20 minutes, converting the incoming files to the self describing BADC-CSV format, but neither the processed or raw data are placed into archive until the following day.
There are no known problems with these data.
Each station report is a separate record in the file consisting of header information about the station and data section. The header section contains the following information:
| Header Elements | Description |
|---|---|
| location | latitude and longitude |
| height | Station Height (m) |
| observation_station | WMO station ID |
| station_type | Details of the station type according to WMO code table 002001 |
| type_of_measuring_equipment | Details of the type of equipment according to WMO code table 002003 |
| type_of_antenna | Details of the type of antenna according to WMO code table 002101 |
| beamwidth | Beamwidth (degrees) |
| mean_frequency | Mean frequency (Hz) |
| range_gate_length | Length of range gates (m) |
| mean_speed_estimation | Mean speed estimation WMO code table 025020 |
| wind_computation_enhancement | wmo code table 025021 |
| rass_computation_correction | wmo code table 025093 |
| averaging_time_period | Time period for averaging (minutes) |
| pressure_at_mean_sea_level | Mean sea level pressure at station (Pa) |
The table below provides the list of available parameters in the column order that they appear in the BADC-CSV files in the archive.
| Column number | ParameterUnit | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Height | m |
| 2 | Virtual temperature | K |
| 3 | Virtual temperature quality control information | 1 |
| 4 | Wind w component | m/s |
| 5 | Vertical wind quality control information | 1 |
| 6 | Signa to noise ratio | DB |