NCAR Upper Air Database, 1920-ongoing

Upper air soundings from about 50 different sources have been consolidated into products that are well documented and provide the longest possible, duplicate-free, station time series. Historical sampling methods have been accounted for by creating two product lines, one with soundings that have wind (UADB-Wind) and another with temperature and humidity (UADB-TRH) measurements.

This approach maximizes the amount of data consolidated, and when profiles have simultaneous temperature, humidity, and wind measurements, they are replicated in both products. The first consolidation step was compositing stations with identical WMO station numbers across all data sources. The UADB-TRH product has nearly 1100 stations that report for 20 years or more, and over 400 stations have time series of 50 years or longer.