METCRAX ISS SODAR Data

The program is investigating the structure and evolution of temperature inversions or cold-air pools that form on a daily basis in topographic basins and valleys. As part of this research a one-month-long field experiment was conducted from 01 October 2006 to 30 October 2006 in Arizona's Meteor Crater, a simple near-ideal topographic basin formed by the impact of a meteor.

In this basin, the physical processes leading to the buildup and breakdown of temperature inversions and the formation of atmospheric seiches (atmospheric oscillations in the basin caused by wind disturbances at the basin crest) can be studied without the complications introduced by more complex topography. This dataset comtains Sound Detection and Ranging (SODAR) data collected by the NCAR/EOL Integrated Sounding System (ISS) during the METCRAX campaign and is available in raw ASCII format.