A three-month comparison of hourly winds and temperatures from co-located 50-MHz and 915-MHz RASS profilers

The Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program has operated a 915-MHz and a 50-MHz radar wind profiler (boundary layer profiler (BLP) and tropospheric profiler (TP), respectively], each coupled with a Radio Acoustic Sounding System (RASS) since April 1994 at its Southern Great Plains (SGP) Cloud and Radiation Testbed (CART) central facility in north central Oklahoma. The dual system is designed to provide continuous wind profiles from near the surface to 12 km or more and virtual temperature profiles from near the surface to 6 km. Because the BLP has a larger antenna than many other 915-MHz systems, the wind profiles sampled by the two systems overlap between 1.5 km and 5.5 km. The two systems are adjacent, so the wind profilers sample almost identical air masses in their overlap region during the averaging period. Nevertheless, the two RASS systems can be compared, and methods can be devised to estimate the temperature profile in the inaccessible region. Data used in all comparisons and calculations discussed below are consensus-averaged values supplied by the profiler software. Although the spectra and moments from the data are available, they were not accessed for this analysis