Radiosonde Parameters Product Released for CoURAGE, EPCAPE Campaigns

Published: 11 May 2026

Lines show pressure and temperature recorded by an ARM radiosonde. — These skew-T plots give temperature and pressure values recorded by ARM radiosondes that were launched at the main instrument sites for CoURAGE (top) and EPCAPE (bottom). The dots indicate different radiosonde parameters. Plots are from the SONDEPARAM value-added product.

The Convective Parameters Derived from Radiosonde Data value-added product (SONDEPARAM VAP) is now available for the 2024–2025 Coast-Urban-Rural Atmospheric Gradient Experiment (CoURAGE) in the Baltimore, Maryland, area and the 2023–2024 Eastern Pacific Cloud Aerosol Precipitation Experiment (EPCAPE) in La Jolla, California.

SONDEPARAM applies stable and consistent algorithms from Wang et al. (2020) to Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility radiosonde data to calculate useful convective cloud parameters. These parameters include convective available potential energy, convective inhibition, and lifting condensation level/level of neutral buoyancy/level of free convection. Because the calculation of these parameters is highly sensitive to the initial parcel characteristics, several parcel options are included (i.e., surface-based, most unstable, mixed layer).

More information about SONDEPARAM, including its technical report, can be found on the VAP web page.

SONDEPARAM data have been released for two instrument sites that operated as part of the CoURAGE field campaign. Data are available from December 1, 2024, to December 1, 2025, for the main site in Baltimore and from February 5 to July 28, 2025, for the rural supplemental site near Mount Airy, Maryland.

EPCAPE data are available from February 15, 2023, to February 13, 2024, for the main instrument site on the Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier.

SONDEPARAM data are available as daily netCDF files.

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

For questions or to report data issues, please contact VAP developer Aifang Zhou or ARM translator Min Deng.

To cite the data, please use doi:10.5439/1827079.

Reference: Wang D, MP Jensen, JA D’Iorio, G Jozef, SE Giangrande, KL Johnson, ZJ Luo, M Starzec, and GL Mullendore. 2020. “An Observational Comparison of Level of Neutral Buoyancy and Level of Maximum Detrainment in Tropical Deep Convective Clouds.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 125(16), e2020JD032637, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JD032637

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