August 5, 2020 Dataset Open Access

RHARM (Radiosounding HARMonization) dataset - subset

Fabio Madonna

Data manager(s)

In the context of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), a novel approach, named RHARM (Radiosounding HARMonization), has been developed to provide a harmonized dataset of temperature, humidity and wind profiles along with an estimation of the measurement uncertainties for about 650 radiosounding stations globally. 

The RHARM method is applied to the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA) Version 2 which is the most comprehensive collection of historical and near-real-time radiosonde and pilot balloon observations from around the globe, maintained and distributed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The daily (0000 and 1200 UTC) radiosonde data holdings on 16 standard pressure levels (from 1000 to 10 hPa) from 1978 to present are post-processed or statistically homogenized using the RHARM approach. The applied adjustments are interpolated to all reported significant levels to retain information content contained within each individual ascent profile.

The dataset made available here is a subset of RHARM (Radiosounding HARMonization) related to the IGRA radiosonde observations for which adequate metadata exist and a post-processing chain based upon a combination of reference measurements, provided by GRUAN, and comparative performance measurements, collected during the 2010 WMO/CIMO campaign, is applicable. 

The RHARM algorithm is the first to provide homogenized time series of temperature, relative humidity and wind profiles alongside an estimation of the observational uncertainty for each single observation at each pressure level. 

A copy of the RHARM dataset is stored in the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS) although not publicly available yet. For review purposes only, a subset has been made available here.