Global Upper Air Monthly Statistics from 1948 to 2001

Global monthly statistical summaries for atmospheric variables at surface, tropopause, and mandatory pressure levels. The dataset contains parameters like mean, standard deviation, quartiles, and extremes for geopotential height, temperature, humidity, and wind components. It was created by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center using data from 1948 through 2001 and is now archived.

Use Cases

• Analyzing long-term trends in monthly mean temperature and specific humidity at mandatory pressure levels.
• Studying the variability of zonal and meridional wind speed using their standard deviation and quartile statistics.
• Validating climate model outputs against observed monthly statistics for geopotential height and dew point temperature.
• Investigating the climatology of tropopause-level parameters like pressure and relative humidity over a 54-year period.

Strengths

• 54-year temporal coverage from 1948 to 2001.
• Provides multiple statistical parameters (mean, std dev, min, max, quartiles) for each variable.
• Global spatial coverage for surface, tropopause, and mandatory pressure levels.

Limitations

• Data collection ended in 2001, making it temporally stale for contemporary climate studies.
• Superseded by the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA), indicating potential format or quality improvements in newer datasets.
• Original row and column counts are unknown, limiting assessment of sample size and granularity.

Provenance

Source

National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), part of NOAA.

Collection Method

Derived from the Comprehensive Aerological Data Set (CARDS), which contains raw upper-air observations.

Time Range

1948 through 2001

Freshness

Final update was 2001-12-31; dataset is archived and no longer updated.

Geography

Global