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GFS and RAOB soundings

Posted By: Bill Moninger
Date: 21-August-07 1728Z

Greetings,

Today we made some additions to the RUC soundings page at http://rucsoundings.noaa.gov/.

1. Generation of soundings from the Global Forecast System (GFS) model now take about 1 second to load, rather than the previous 20+ seconds. These soundings are available world-wide, on a 0.5 degree grid, primarily for comparison with aircraft (AMDAR) soundings where the RUC isn't available. (The GFS runs 4 times a day at 0,6,12,18 UTC. We have forecasts projections of 0 h (analyses), 3 hours, and multiples of 6 hours out to 120 hours. (Additional forecast projections are available in binary form from NCEP.) We keep model results available for 5 days.) See http://wwwt.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/gmb/moorthi/gam.html for more information about the GFS.

The RUC is still the model of choice for short-range forecasts and for AMDAR comparisons where it is available, because of its rapid cycle time and assimilation of timely data from a wide variety or sources. Its domain will soon expand to cover North America.

2. RAOB soundings now include an estimated balloon track, generated by assuming a 5 m/s ascent rate. To accomplish this, we changed the text format for RAOB data to include 3 additional columns. See http://rucsoundings.noaa.gov/raob_format.html for format details.

Let us know by email or via this forum if you have questions or see unexpected behavior.

-Bill

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