NCSU Soundings IMPACTS V1: Atmospheric Profiles from a Winter Storm Campaign

Atmospheric sounding data collected by the North Carolina State University student sounding club for the IMPACTS field campaign. The dataset includes vertical profiles of temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind, launched from Raleigh, NC on February 20, 2020. IMPACTS was a three-year campaign (2020-2022) studying snowstorms over the U.S. Atlantic Coast.

Use Cases

• Analyze vertical atmospheric structure based on temperature, humidity, and pressure profiles
• Study wind shear and directional changes with altitude based on wind speed and direction data
• Validate or improve snowfall remote sensing and modeling based on in-situ atmospheric observations
• Investigate snowband formation mechanisms based on data collected during the IMPACTS campaign

Strengths

• Data includes vertical profiles of five key atmospheric variables: temperature, relative humidity, pressure, wind speed, and wind direction
• Collected as part of a focused, three-year field campaign (IMPACTS) with specific scientific objectives
• Files are available in netCDF-4 format, a standard for scientific data

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Data appears to be from a single date (February 20, 2020) within the campaign period

Provenance

Source

North Carolina State University student sounding club, aggregated by NASA via Data.gov

Collection Method

Launched rawinsondes (weather balloons) from Raleigh, NC

Time Range

Primary data from February 20, 2020; campaign spanned 2020-2022

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-10 19:43:50.249517; freshness should be verified

Geography

Launch site: Raleigh, North Carolina, USA; campaign focus: U.S. Atlantic Coast