Global Unified Profiling System (3 mb)GUPS, Global Unified Profiling System
Description:
The Global Unified Profiling System is a new, long-term global observing system that would improve weather and climate prediction. Data from locations over the oceans and polar regions is sparse. This proposed new observing network consists of 240 fixed locations over the oceans and polar regions where oceanic and atmospheric profiles would be routinely measured. Each location would be visited by an unmanned aerial vehicle which would cruise the lower stratosphere and descend to near the surface during flight, using dropsondes and on-board, in situ instruments to obtain detailed profiles of state variables, clouds, aerosols, and chemistry. In the ocean, at the same locations where the atmospheric profiles are measured, a new generation of ocean observatories and buoys would be deployed to report surface and subsurface data.
This datasets shows the track that the unmanned aerial vehicles would follow. The grid of data points is set up in such a way that they are equally distributed across the oceans and polar regions. Each plane would follow the labeled tracks on the dataset every three days so that new data is available from every location every three days. At each point on the grid the plane drops several dropsondes that stay at specified pressure levels and travel with the wind. Each of the dropsondes is denoted by the colored lines that appear. The length of the line is proportional to the time it has spent in the atmosphere. This would dramatically increase the amount of information that is available about the atmosphere over the oceans and polar regions and provide detailed profiles of important climate parameters such as temperature and moisture.
Notable Features:
- 240 data points equally spaced across the oceans and polar regions
- Each track takes 72 hours (3 days) to complete
- Lines indicate pressure level dropsondes distributed by the planes
Data Category
Major: Atmosphere
Keywords:
GUPS, unmanned aerial vehicles, atmosphere
| Data Set Name | gups_aircraft |
| Data Set Source | NOAA/GSD |
| Data Set Developer | NOAA/GSD |
| Visualization Developer | Nikki Prive NOAA/GSD |
| Audio | No |
| Download | FTP |