Legacy atmospheric sounding dataset project
| 14 F or over a half-century, field campaigns have played a central role in advancing the atmospheric sciences. Although recent decades have witnessed organized efforts at cataloging and archiving field campaign data for both United States and international experiments, largely through the auspices of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), data from campaigns from the 1950s into the 1980s have not been systematically collected and archived at a central location. Here we report on an effort to take steps to correct this situation, with an initial focus on atmospheric sounding data. Furthermore, we make an appeal to the international community to assist in this effort by identifying and locating observations from past field campaigns and reporting this information to our project website. Invariably, field campaigns involve substantial resources to conduct special or intensive observations over selected locations around the globe. The resulting data have been invaluable as the main observational bases for advancing tropical, midlatitude, and polar research, much of it involving processes associated with clouds and archives