Sadler's Tropical Wind Climatology, 1960-1973 Monthly Means

Long-term monthly mean wind data for tropical regions, derived from aircraft and rawinsonde observations between 1960 and 1973. The dataset was created by James Sadler and is hosted by NASA EarthData. It provides manually analyzed 2.5-degree gridded wind speed and direction.

Use Cases

• Analyzing historical tropical wind climatology patterns based on monthly mean grids.
• Comparing early manual analysis methods with modern reanalysis products based on the dataset's derivation.
• Studying long-term atmospheric circulation in tropical regions based on the 14-year time range.
• Validating or providing context for modern climate models based on historical observational data.

Strengths

• Covers a 14-year period from 1960 to 1973.
• Combines data from two distinct sources: aircraft reports and rawinsonde observations.
• Provides manually analyzed wind fields on a 2.5-degree latitude-longitude grid.

Limitations

• Last updated 1973-12-31 23:59:59.999000; freshness should be verified.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The platform recommends using more modern reanalysis datasets due to improved methods and formats.

Provenance

Source

SCIOPS, via NASA EarthData and the UCAR Research Data Archive (RDA).

Collection Method

Manually analyzed from summarized aircraft data and average rawinsonde data.

Time Range

1960 to 1973.

Freshness

Historical dataset; last update corresponds to the end of its temporal coverage.

Geography

Tropical regions, likely global, based on 5-degree and 2.5-degree latitude-longitude grids.