Observations from the NOAA P-3 aircraft during ATOMIC

The characteristics of the in situ observations, expendable devices, and remote sensing instrumentation are described, as is the processing used in deriving estimates of physical quantities. Data archived at the National Center for Environmental Information include flight-level data such as aircraft navigation and basic thermodynamic information (NOAA Aircraft Operations Center and NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory, 2020, doi.org/10.25921/7jf5-wv54); high-accuracy measurements of water vapor concentration from an isotope analyzer (National Center for Atmospheric Research, 2020, doi.org/10.25921/c5yx-7w29); in situ observations of aerosol, cloud, and precipitation size distributions (Leandro and Chuang, 2020, doi.org/10.25921/vwvq-5015); profiles of seawater temperature made with Airborne eXpendable BathyThermographs (AXBTs; NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory, 2020a, doi.org/10.25921/pe39-sx75); radar reflectivity, Doppler velocity, and spectrum width from a nadir-lookingW-band radar (NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory, 2020c, doi.org/10.25921/n1hc-dc30); estimates of cloud presence, the cloud-top location, and the cloud-top radar reflectivity and temperature, along with estimates of 10m wind speed obtained from remote sensing instruments operating in the microwave and thermal infrared spectral regions (NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory, 2020b, doi.org/10.25921/x9q59745); and ocean surface wave characteristics from a Wide Swath Radar Altimeter (Prosensing, Inc., 2020, doi.org/10.25921/qm06-qx04).

Data are provided as netCDF files following Climate and Forecast conventions.