Soundings problem

[Peter Creswick]

You are only half correct on that Tim.

I have personally visited SAMU (Sydney Aeronautical Meterology Unit) at YSSY (Sydney International Airport) - (I live here, it is only about 7 miles away) and spoken to them about it.

The story is this.

Nationwide, the BoM (Bureau of Meterology) launches their sounding flights for 00Z and 12Z, EXCEPT for Sydney (94767). The reason for the exception is Sydney's polution problem. What the ******* has that got to do with it you say ?

Well, everything. There is this mob called the NSW EPA (New South Wales State Government - Environment Protection Agency), similar setup to your US EPA. As you can imagine, polution and air quality is one of their big deals, particularly since the topography of Sydney creates a "smog bowl" much like your famous LA smog proble, indeed, in scientific circles, ours is considered to be worse !! If you look a detailed topographic map of the "Sydney Basin" (an area about 50 mile radius of YSSY) you will see why. We have the Blue Mountains to the west and a plateau to the north and south, and the ocean (Tasman Sea) to the east.

Anyway, if you want to have a look, at the EPA air quality site - go here:- http://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/airqual/aqupd.asp but you may as well go directly to the map here:- http://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/air/sydney3.htm
If you look at the map, note the EARLWOOD station, that is about one mile from me. Also note that directly under the second of the two o's in earlwood, is the runway sticking out into Botany Bay. About where the runway touches the second o is where the SAMU is located.

OK, this is getting all a bit longwinded, but the point is this. The EPA demanded that BoM fly OZONE SONDES for the smog readings, and since they have a "morning and afternoon" reporting mandate, the end result was that BoM does a 6am local time launch with an ordinary met sonde and an ozone sonde in one package (20Z) and the same in the afternoon at 3pm local time (05Z), to meet the EPA demands. They don't do 10am (00Z) or 10pm (12Z) launches at all because of cost (the EPA pays for their launches, and effectively BoM gets a free ride for theirs !). Then the problem is that when the data goes out to the EPA (since they pay for it) it goes with the WMO sonde data as well. The result is that when it goes into the system for feeding to the WMO GTS, it has an EPA header line in front, that none of the overseas sites seem to be able to decode, hence 94767 met-sonde data never shows up anywhere on the net. I bitched like hell to anyone in BoM who would listen (politely), but that was 3 years ago, and still no change. I even e-mailed the people at COD and FSU to see if the data got there, but it got filtered out by scripts further up the food chain. FSU did reply and we exchanged a number of e-mails a while back, but the end result was they said 94767 TTAA and TTBB never get to them. However, all the other 3 hourly wind finding flights go through no problem, and that is what you have in the post above.

When Laurier Williams used to get the internal BoM sonde data feeds, he put them up on his DA data site, but the files still had that header I mentioned, and neither DA or Raob would read it either, so I simply edited it out, and then DA and Raob read the data no problem.

Unfortunately Laurier no longer gets the data (our BoM charge an arm and a leg - not free like the US) so with no justification for the expense, he discontinued the upper air service.

[Tim Vasquez]

Hmm... sucks to hear that... maybe I ought to embargo Digital Atmosphere sales from government weather agencies unless they support free data exchange.

Tim