NOAA Soundings IMPACTS: Atlantic Coast Snowstorm Profiles

North American Atlantic Coast data was collected from January 2020 to March 2023 during the IMPACTS field campaign focused on snowstorms. The dataset contains vertical profile measurements from radiosondes, including temperature, wind speed, humidity, pressure, and geopotential height across tropospheric levels. It was produced by the GHRC DAAC to advance understanding of snowband formation and improve snowfall prediction models.

Use Cases

• Analyzing vertical wind shear and temperature profiles to study snowband organization mechanisms.
• Correlating dew point temperature and relative humidity with snow particle growth processes.
• Using geopotential height and atmospheric pressure data to validate atmospheric model layers.
• Examining mixing ratio and equivalent potential temperature to assess atmospheric instability during winter storms.
• Integrating wind direction and speed profiles with remote sensing data to improve snowfall retrieval algorithms.

Strengths

• Data covers a multi-year time range from 2020-01-01 to 2023-03-01, capturing multiple winter storm seasons.
• Includes a detailed set of 12 atmospheric variables measured at various tropospheric levels.
• Dataset is hosted on multiple authoritative platforms (NASA Earthdata and Data.gov), indicating curation and importance.

Limitations

• Exact row count and total dataset size are not specified in any source.
• Sources conflict on the last update date: one states 2026-03-12, another states 2023-03-01.

Provenance

Source

GHRC DAAC (Global Hydrology Resource Center Distributed Active Archive Center)

Collection Method

Collected via radiosonde launches during the IMPACTS field campaign.

Time Range

2020-01-01 to 2023-03-01

Freshness

2026-03-12 23:18:29.625595

Geography

North American Atlantic Coast region