JOANNE: Joint dropsonde Observations of the Atmosphere in tropical North atlaNtic meso-scale Environments

Overview & Synopsis

As part of the EUREC4A field campaign which took place over the tropical North Atlantic during January–February 2020, 1215 dropsondes from the HALO and WP-3D aircraft were deployed through 26 flights to characterize the thermodynamic and dynamic environment of clouds in the trade-wind regions. We present JOANNE (Joint dropsonde Observations of the Atmosphere in tropical North atlaNtic meso-scale Environments), the dataset that contains these dropsonde measurements and the products derived from them. Along with the raw measurement profiles and basic post-processing of pressure, temperature, relative humidity and horizontal winds, the dataset also includes a homogenized and gridded dataset with 10 m vertical spacing. The gridded data are used as a basis for deriving diagnostics of the area-averaged mesoscale circulation properties such as divergence, vorticity, vertical velocity and gradient terms, making use of sondes dropped at regular intervals along a circular flight path. A total of 85 such circles, ∼ 222 km in diameter, were flown during EUREC4A. We describe the sampling strategy for dropsonde measurements during EUREC4A, the quality control for the data, the methods of estimation of additional products from the measurements and the different post-processed levels of the dataset. The dataset is publicly available (https://doi.org/10.25326/246, George et al., 2021b) as is the software used to create it (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4746312, George, 2021).