Quality-controlled upper-air sounding dataset for DYNAMO/CINDY/AMIE: Development and corrections

With 72 rawinsonde sites and dropsonde data from 13 aircraft missions, the sounding network covers the tropics from eastern Africa to the western Pacific. In total nearly 26 000 soundings were collected from this network during the experiment's 6-month extended observing period (from October 2011 to March 2012).

Slightly more than half of the soundings, collected from 33 sites, are at high vertical resolution. Rigorous post-field phase processing of the sonde data included several levels of quality checks and a variety of corrections that address a number of issues (e.g., daytime dry bias, baseline surface data errors, ship deck heating effects, and artificial dry spikes in slow-ascent soundings). Because of the importance of an accurate description of the moisture field in meeting the scientific goals of the experiment, particular attention is given to humidity correction and its validation.