UAlbany Soundings IMPACTS: Upper-Air Winter Storm Measurements

U.S. Atlantic coast winter snowstorms were studied using meteorological balloon soundings during the 2023 IMPACTS field campaign. The dataset contains vertical profiles of atmospheric pressure, humidity, mixing ratio, wind speed, and wind direction. These observations support research into snowband formation, microphysics, and improving snowfall prediction models.

Use Cases

• Analyzing vertical wind profiles to understand storm organization and evolution.
• Studying humidity and mixing ratio data to examine snow particle growth mechanisms.
• Validating and improving remote sensing interpretations of snowfall.
• Providing in-situ atmospheric pressure and wind data for numerical weather model initialization.

Strengths

• Data originates from a focused, three-year NASA field campaign (IMPACTS) with specific scientific objectives.
• Provides a temporally bounded set of high-resolution upper-air observations from January 5 to March 1, 2023.
• Cross-platform presence on NASA Earthdata and Data.gov signals its importance and curation.

Limitations

• Column names and exact row counts are not provided in the available metadata.
• The dataset's license is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified' without clear terms.
• Data is available only in ASCII format, which may require parsing for modern analysis tools.

Provenance

Source

University at Albany (UAlbany), collected for the NASA IMPACTS campaign and hosted by the GHRC DAAC.

Collection Method

Measured with iMet-3050A sounding systems launched on 200-gram meteorological balloons.

Time Range

January 5, 2023 through March 1, 2023

Freshness

2026-04-09 21:18:30.894651

Geography

U.S. Atlantic coast region, specific to IMPACTS campaign deployment areas.