RAOBCORE/RICH Version 1.5.1

December 2015, Update June 2022

The RAOBCORE/RICH software package has been developed at University of Vienna since 2004. It has been initially funded by an EU Marie Curie fellowship for Dr. Leopold Haimberger and has then been funded by four  FWF projects and EU FP7 collaborative projects ERA-CLIM and ERA-CLIM2. It has been used to adjust radiosonde temperatures before assimilation in the ERA-Interim and ERA5 reanalyses. Further development is funded by the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Since 2015 it has been updated several times, the links below point to the most recent updates. For RICH, only one realization is provided in the later updates. 

Comprehensive radiosonde/PILOT temperature and wind archive on 16 standard pressure levels

Within the framework of EU-project ERA-CLIM, a comprehensive radiosonde/PILOT wind archive has been developed. It can be accessed via PANGAEA (http://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.823617) over their standardized portal. The archive does not yet contain homogeneity adjustments. 

RAOBCORE

One is to use again the background forecasts as reference. This has been done in the RAOBCORE homogenization method.

The current version of radiosonde temperature adjustments is v1.5.1 It basically consists of a single ASCII-file containing the stationIDs and all the adjustments and adjustment dates on 16 pressure levels for 00GMT and 12GMT. The adjustments can be added to the original datasets to yield homogenized time series.

A RAOBCORE- v1.5 adjusted temperature anomaly dataset with 10x5 degree resolution can be downloaded via  https://webdata.wolke.img.univie.ac.at/haimberger/v1.5.1/ 
The directory contains updates until 2017, where raobcore_15_gridded_... are the right files (in netCDF format). The directory contains also the raw gridded data (raobcore_raw_gridded_...) without adjustments. 

The latest updates can be downloaded from https://webdata.wolke.img.univie.ac.at/haimberger/v1.9/ 

RICH

Using the background forecasts as reference has the disadvantage that the forecasts themselves may be influenced by biases in the radiosonde temperatuers. They may also be influenced by biases from other observing systems, most notably satellites. This problem can be avoided by creating reference series from neighboring radiosonde stations for breakpoint adjustment. This works well as long as the radiosonde network is not too sparse and as long one takes care that only homogeneous pieces of the neighboring time series are used. RICH is superficially documented in Haimberger, Tavolato and Sperka (2008). A more detailed documentation can be found at Haimberger et al. (2012)

A gridded NetCDF formatted RICH-adjusted radiosondet dataset can be downloaded from the same directory as above. The file name patterns are rich15obs_mean_gridded... 

The whole RICH ensemble, as described in  can be downloaded via https://webdata.wolke.img.univie.ac.at/haimberger/v1.5.1/ens/ .

The latest updates (v1.9) can be downloaded from https://webdata.wolke.img.univie.ac.at/haimberger/v1.9/

Other formats of RAOBCORE- and RICH adjusted data

Station time series with monthly and daily resolution are available on request from leopold.haimberger(at)univie.ac.at

Selected Publications