Impacts of Merging Profiler and Rawinsonde Winds on TOGA COARE Analyses

During the intensive observing period of the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment, a large number of collocated rawinsonde and profiler wind observations were taken at six Integrated Sounding System (ISS) sites and Biak, Indonesia. To mitigate limitations in the rawinsonde dataset due to missing and bad wind observations, a procedure was developed to combine profiler and sonde winds to produce an integrated, high-quality, upper-air sounding dataset. In addition to improving the overall quality of the winds, this procedure eliminates several data gaps in the sonde dataset. For example, below 800 hPa the amount of bad and missing wind data is reduced from about 45% to 20% at the land-based ISS sites.