New Tethered Balloon Merged Data Available From Oklahoma Flights

Published: 26 February 2025

A tethered balloon carries instruments aloft under a cloud-filled sky. — Instruments fly on a tethered balloon at ARM’s Southern Great Plains atmospheric observatory. Photo is by Brent Peterson, Sandia National Laboratories.

New data from the Tethered Balloon System (TBS) Merged value-added product (TBSMERGED VAP) are available from flights at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) atmospheric observatory.

The TBSMERGED VAP combines data from TBS instruments and ground-based ceilometers, allowing for examination of cloud-base and boundary-layer heights while making it easier to access and use measurements from ARM TBS missions.

The new TBSMERGED production data are from the SGP Central Facility near Lamont, Oklahoma, from September 9, 2023, through the latest flight on November 14, 2024. Due to planned deployment of TBS at other ARM observatories, there will be no more flights at the SGP until November 2025 at the earliest.

More information about the VAP can be found on the TBSMERGED web page.

Access the new TBSMERGED data in the ARM Data Center. (To download the data, first create an ARM account.)

For questions, feedback, or to report data problems, please contact Darielle Dexheimer, ARM’s lead TBS instrument mentor.

To cite the TBSMERGED data, please use doi:10.5439/1862017.

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ARM is a DOE Office of Science user facility operated by nine DOE national laboratories.