Correlative gridded data from NOAA's National Meteorological Center
(NMC) are included as supplementary data products to the UARS Project.
The main use of the correlative data from the NMC run is to provide an
independent analysis for comparison with data from the UARS
instruments.
NMC geopotential height and atmospheric temperature data are derived
from two analysis systems: 1) tropospheric fields from 1000 to 100 mb,
and 2) stratospheric analyses from 70 to 0.4 mb.The tropospheric
fields are the 1200 GMT gridded fields which are part of the Global
Daily Assimilation System (GDAS), where data from radiosondes,
aircraft, satellites, ships, bouys, or any other conventional means
are assimilated and merged into meteorological fields (heights,
temperature, winds).The stratospheric analyses are 1200 GMT
operational analyses at the 70 - 0.4 mb pressure levels produced from
satellite temperature retrievals and RAOBS via a modified Cressman
analysis.Tropospheric temperature analyses use combined NOAA-10 and
NOAA-11 data.Moisture (northern hemisphere only) and Winds data are
obtained from the NMC GDAS.
Correlative NMC gridded data products consists of four subtypes per
day containing the following parameters:
- HEIGHT geopotential height, m
- MOISTURE moisture, %
- TEMP atmospheric temperature, degrees K
- WINDSwind components, u and v (meridional and zonal), m/s
The gridded fields are on the standard 65x65 NMC polar stereographic
grid oriented 80W (grid increment 381 km at 60N), and 100E (grid
increment 381 km at 60S); Pole at (33,33).The NMC uses 18 standard
pressure levels for data at 1000, 850, 700, 500, 400, 300, 250, 200,
150, 100, 70, 50, 30, 10, 5, 2, 1, 0.4 millibars.
Height and temperature data are produced at 18 pressure levels from
1000 mb to 0.4 mb.Moisture data are only produced in the northern
hemisphere for the 6 lowest altitude pressure levels.Wind data are
produced for the 12 lowest altitude levels in the northern hemisphere,
and at the 4 levels 1000, 500, 300, and 250 mb in the southern
hemisphere.
There are four data files representing each subtype per day.Included
in the NMC correlative data set will be a geographical data richness
file.This file is used by the NMC access routines, and indicates the
radiosonde coverage for each point on the NMC grid.
Atmos Composition
