First ISCCP Regional Experiment (FIRE) Atlantic Stratocumulus Transition Experiment (ASTEX) ECMWF Cloud Data

ECMWF has requested that anyone making use of this data set acknowledge them, and that those investigators publishing research that makes more than casual use of this data set contact Ernst Klinker or Tony Hollingsworth.The data have been decoded by Chris Bretherton into ASCII files, one for each horizontal field at a given level and base time. All data have the same horizontal resolution of 1.25 degrees in latitude and longitude and correspond to base (initialization) times of 00, 06, 12, or 18Z.

Different fields have different lat/lon ranges and sets of available vertical levels, as tabulated below. Also, some fields are instantaneous (I) while others are accumulated (A) over the first 6 hours of a forecast initialized at the base time. This is tabulated in the 'time range' column below.

Instantaneous fields are bestcompared with data at the base time, while accumulated fields are best compared with data three hours after the base time.Data Set Name ECMWF ECMWF Time Field Units field ID# range abbrev.----------- ------ ----- ----- ----- -----CLOUDS CLW 212 I Cloud liquid water kg/kg CF 213 I Cloud fraction 0-1(lat/lon range: 35W to 05W, 20N to 45N)(levels: 1010,1000,975,950,925,900,875,850,825,800,775,750,700,650,600,550,500,400,300,200,100 HPa)The ECMWF field abbreviation, ID#, field description and units aretaken directly from ECMWF Code Table 2, in case you ever need toconsult with ECMWF about this data set.