McMurdo Station’s Radiosonde/Rawinsonde (Weather Balloon) observation data contained in this record comes in several formats, all are ASCII text unless otherwise noted:
1956-1982
- MMYYYY.ms.txt (Starts 1956 – ends 1982)
- MMYYYYms.dat (Starts 1980 – ends 1982)
The data prior to 1980 is organized by month and is data. Each launch has a two-line header, mentioning the station, year, month, day, and hour, followed by the information displayed in the eight columns that follow. This data was compiled by Shawn Smith, a former graduate student at UW-Madison.
1983-1993
- YY.dat (Missing 1986, 1988, 1989, 1992, 1993)
For the files from 1983 to 1991 with no header: the first column is the station ID with the year, QQQQQYY, where Q is a digit of the ID and YY is the YEAR. The second column is the MONTH, third column is the DAY, fourth column is one of the two TIMEs that the soundings are taken, 0 or 12 UTC, the fifth column is a NUMBER corresponding to each of the observations taken during the sounding, the sixth column is pressure in MILLIBARS multiplied by a factor of 10, seventh column is GEOPOTENTIAL HEIGHT in METERS, the eighth column is TEMP in CELSIUS multiplied by a factor of 10, nineth column is both RH and WIND DIRECTION in the format of RRDDD, where R is a digit of RH and DD is a digit of the wind direction, and the first digit in the tenth column is WINDSPEED in meters per second. The first number of the last column is the designation for the LEVEL (1=MANDATORY, 2,3=SIGNIFICAN, and 4=TROPOPAUSET). This unsorted data is sent to us directly or collected by AMRC with the cooperation of the source and hasn't undergone any preprocessing.
1994-Present
- YYYY.mcu (Starts 1994 - ends 1998)
- YYMMDDHH.mcu (Starts 1994 - ends 1998)
- YYYY.zip files (Start 2022 – end 2023)
- MONTHAirlogYY.xls (Starts 2003 to ends Jan 2024)
- YYMMDDHH.DAT (Starts 1996…turns into .dat files)
- YYMMDDHH.dat (Starts 1997 – format changes over time…filename changes over time and continues to present)
- YYMMDDHH.cmb (Starts 2003 …filename changes over time and continues to present)
*.mwx binary format files (Start December 2018 continues to present)
The data for 1994-on is available for McMurdo is in the unsorted format mailed to us from Naval Support Force Antarctica (NSFA). The data files are organized by day and are less than 20K apiece. These files also have headers, so it should be obvious how the data is organized once the files are viewed. As can be seen, several different types of data are provided. ALT GEOPM is the geopotential height in meters, DIR DEG is the wind direction, SPEED KTS is the wind speed in knots, TEMP C and DEW DEP C are the air temperature and dew point in degrees Celsius, PRESS MB is the air pressure in mb, and RH % is the relative humidity in percent. Note that the files for February 10th, 1996, through February 29th, 1996, were converted from a word processor format, and may not exactly exemplify the spacing found in most of the other 1994-on data. The file names are constructed as follows: yymmddhh.mcu where yy is the year, mm is the month, dd is the day, and hh is the hour. The initial headers within the file also contain date and time information, but these are less reliable than the file names themselves. Please note a format change which takes place in late November 1998 on the .mcu files and the absence of high-resolution radiosonde data after this time. File name convention is simply: mmyy.uad where mm is the month and yy is the year. This unsorted data is sent to us directly or collected by AMRC with the cooperation of the source and hasn't undergone any preprocessing.
The data file format MWX is the default output format of the current Vaisala DigiCORA Sounding System MW41. A MWX file is a ZIP file, containing single table XML files. Each table contains either metadata, or data, including raw data, intermediate results or product data. Data from both RS41 and RS92 radiosondes can be stored in the MWX format. In addition, it can contain data from auxiliary sensors connected via XData, including ECC Ozone sonde, CFH, and others. The files can be analyzed using a tool called the GruanToolRs92 (gt92) from the GCOS Reference Upper-Air Network (GRUAN).
Types of radiosonde instrumentation used at McMurdo:
- 18 Oct. 2017 - present: Vaisala MW41 System RS41-SGP Radiosonde
- 30 Aug. 2004 - 17 Oct. 2017: Vaisala MW41 System RS92-SGP Radiosonde
