As the “water tower of Asia”, the Tibetan Plateau has a profound impact on the global natural environment and climate change. Therefore, analyzing the distribution characteristics of troposphere-stratospheric water vapor over the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is an important part of understanding the water vapor source and change characterize. In situ observations are limit in this region, and the water vapor sounding data set is needed. Therefore, we carried out balloon-borne measurements at Lhasa and Kunming over the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and then obtained the vertical distribution of water vapor in the troposphere and lower stratosphere over the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The dataset is named “Pan-Third Pole Water Vapor Sounding”, which is mainly the water vapor profile data obtained by balloon sounding conducted at Lhasa and Kunming in August from July 2009 to 2019. Altitude (Altitude), Water vapor (H2O), temperature (Temp), potential temperature (K), and air pressure (Press) from near the surface to 20 km are obtained by conventional balloons soundings payloaded with the Cryogenic Frost Point Hygrometer (CFH) and radiosonde (iMet). Data is transmitted in real time to the ground receiving station via a radiosonde.

File naming and required software

Pan-Third Pole Water Vapor Sounding_ Kunming_ 200908.nc is the water vapor data of Kunming in August 2009.
It is recommended to use Python and NCAR command language (NCL) to read and write data

Data Citations Data citation guideline What's data citation?

Cite as:

Bian, J. (2022). Pan-Third Pole Water Vapor Sounding (2009-2019). A Big Earth Data Platform for Three Poles, DOI: 10.11888/Atmos.tpdc.272504. CSTR: 18406.11.Atmos.tpdc.272504. (Download the reference： RIS | Bibtex )

Related Literatures:

1. Bian, J., Pan, L.L., Paulik, L., V¨omel, H., & Chen, H. (2012). In situ water vapor and ozone measurements in Lhasa and Kunming during the Asian summer monsoon. Geophys. Res. Lett. 39, L19808. https://doi.org/10.1029/2012GL052996.( View Details | Bibtex)

2. Ma, D., Bian, J., Li, D., Bai, Z., Li, Q., Zhang, J., Wang, H., Zheng, X., Hurst, D. F., & Vömel, H. (2022). Mixing characteristics within the tropopause transition layer over the Asian summer monsoon region based on ozone and water vapor sounding data, Atmospheric Research, 271, 106093, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2022.106093.( View Details | Bibtex)

3. Li, D., Vogel, B., Bian, J., Müller, R., Pan, L.L., Günther, G., Bai, Z., Li, Q., Zhang, J., Fan, Q., & V¨omel, H. (2017). Impact of typhoons on the composition of the upper troposphere within the Asian summer monsoon anticyclone: the SWOP campaign in Lhasa 2013. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 17, 4657–4672. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-4657-2017.( View Details | Bibtex)

Using this data, the data citation is required to be referenced and the related literatures are suggested to be cited.

Support Program

Pan-Third Pole Environment Study for a Green Silk Road-A CAS Strategic Priority A Program (No:XDA20000000)

Copyright & License

To respect the intellectual property rights, protect the rights of data authors, expand services of the data center, and evaluate the application potential of data, data users should clearly indicate the source of the data and the author of the data in the research results generated by using the data (including published papers, articles, data products, and unpublished research reports, data products and other results). For re-posting (second or multiple releases) data, the author must also indicate the source of the original data.

License： This work is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)