Data here collected during Atmospheric River Reconnaissance flights during the winters of 2018-2024. Flights and data collected and provided by the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center (NOAA Gulfstream IV) and the US Air Force Reserve Command 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron (WC-130J).

For more information visit: https://cw3e.ucsd.edu/arrecon_overview/

AR Recon campaign years are identified by winter season (November – March) as defined by the year as of January 1, as a result some AR Recon campaigns contain IOPs from consecutive calendar years within the same campaign year.

Data are sorted by campaign year, intensive observation period (IOP), then aircraft. IOPs are numbered chronologically each campaign year. Additional data from east coast flights and train flights are included for some years.

Data types and formatting information for each dropsonde are below. Note not all data types below are available for every flight and additional sonde and flight data files are available in most cases. YYYY=year, MM=month, DD=day, HH=hour, MN=minute, SS=second of observation taken.
DYYYYMMDD_HHMNSS.#: Raw dropsonde observations (column headers in file)
DYYYYMMDD_HHMNSS_P.#: Raw dropsonde observations (column headers in file)
DYYYYMMDD_HHMNSSQC.* : Quality controlled dropsonde data in various formats including bufr, netcdf, and text formats
DYYYYMMDD_HHMNSSSummary.txt : Dropsonde and QC summary
DYYYYMMDD_HHMNSSWMO.txt :  WMO decoded dropsonde file
DYYYYMMDD_HHMNSSskewt.png or .svg: Skew T image files
/HDOBS/: Contains WMO decoded flight level data