Sunday, August 23, 2009

Very Strange RRS Sounding At Flagstaff - 8-22-09

Running a bit behind, but I meant to mention the above sounding earlier. It is the morning sounding taken at Flagstaff on Friday August 22, 2009. It appears to exhibit a problem sometimes found in RRS data when the humistor is bad. Sometimes a bad RRS humistor will have a very very slow response time and tend toward very slowly changing RH. This leads to strange looking soundings that exhibit little structure in the Td trace (i.e., deep layers with straight line traces and similar zigs and zags in both the T and Td traces. The sounding above displays these characteristics, except for a noisy layer between 500 and 400 mb. I suspect that the humidty sensor used on this flight was bad. Soundings such as this will be very hard for all but the most astute researchers to detect in future years!

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