Lake Michigan 2023/2024 Windsond Dataset and Analysis Scripts

This repository contains data collected from Windsond launches over western Lake Michigan from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Neeskay Research Vessel, alongside a series of scripts and data analysis images used for publication in the Weather and Forecasting Journal.

Windsond data are stored in windsond_data_files.zip folder with a nn-mmddyyyy naming convention, where nn refers to the internal mission number. Each mission begins around 0800 Central Daylight Time (CDT) and ends around 1600 CDT, with approximately twelve to fifteen Windsond launches conducted per mission at intervals fo 20 to 60 min. Soundings have a filenaming convention of yyyy-mm-dd_hhmm.*, where the hour and minute are in local time (Central Daylight Time unless otherwise indicated) and refer to the time at which the sonde was first paired with its receiver (typically 1-5 min prior to launch). There are typically five files per launch:

• *.kml - contains the latitude, longitude, and altitude for each data point along the sounding's path
• *.sharppy.png - SHARPpy-generated visualization of the sounding
• *.sharppy.txt - sounding data in SHARPpy text format, with headers
• *.sounding - sounding data in Windsond format
• *.sounding.csv - sounding data in comma-separated format, with headers

Temperature data use version 3.5.2 of Windsond's radiation correction algorithm - the most recent version of the algorithm with improved radiation correction to prior versions (i.e. version 3.0). Data are not further quality controlled; only standard Windsond internal (i.e., automated) quality-control procedures are applied.

The scripts used to create the figures for the journal article are stored in the python_scipts.zip folder in the repository. The scripts are titled based on their utilization in figure creation. For example, fig1_script.py was used to create figure 1, fig2_script.py was used to create figure 2, etc. Some scripts were used to create multiple figures, which is specified in the naming convention of the .py files. The figures themselves are stored in the numbered_figures.zip folder in this repository. 

Thermograph data on 1 June 2023 provided by Dr. Russell Cuhel of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Freshwater Sciences is contained within the thermograph_data.zip folder in the repository. Thermograph data is available for the 5th, 9th, and 13th launch, contained in its raw and processed format within .xls files with a 20230601BAL#profile.xls, where # refers to the launch number.