U.S. Air Force Upper Air/Contrails Climatology (UACLIMO)

BRIEF

Upper Air/Contrails Climatology (UACLIMO, Version 2.0) is an interactive upper air climatology PC-based program. UACLIMO produces climatological information for several flight legs of a flight route or information for a single point on the globe. The data was derived from the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) upper air database at a resolution of 150 nautical miles (nm) between data points. The UACLIMO software displays vertical profiles from the surface to 100 mb for the following variables; pressure, height, temperature, D-value, wind speed, wind direction, and wind factor. The program interpolates data values for the aircraft's vertical position, then place the aircraft data relative to the mandatory pressure levels.

The dataset also includes climatological contrail probabilities. The software produces graphical displays of the percent probability of contrail formation. The probabilities are dependent upon flight level and engine type. The user can specify 4 different engine types. The contrail probabilities are calculated by comparing the monthly mean temperatures and standard deviations (from the ECMWF database) to "critical temperatures" for contrail formation. The critical temperatures were calculated through discriminant analysis techniques developed from a large database of pilot reports (PIREPS).

The software was designed for an IBM-PC or compatible and requires a 286 or better processor, CGA or EGA graphics, MS-DOS 3.2 or higher, 640K bytes main memory, Epson-compatible dot matrix or laserjet II printer for hard copy graphs, 1.1M bytes hard-disk space. The data require an additional 25M bytes hard-disk space.

ATTRIBUTES

Entry_ID: USAFETAC_UACLIMO (MD Identifier: 5381)
 
Geographic Coverage:
     Southwest Extent: 90S,180E    Northeast Extent:  90N,180E
 
Storage Media:
     floppy diskettes
 
Discipline, Subdiscipline:
     EARTH SCIENCE                   > ATMOSPHERE
 
Location Keyword:
     GLOBAL
 
Parameter Group, Parameter:
     ATMOSPHERIC DYNAMICS            > ALTITUDE
     ATMOSPHERIC DYNAMICS            > ATMOSPHERIC TEMPERATURE
     ATMOSPHERIC DYNAMICS            > PRESSURE
     ATMOSPHERIC DYNAMICS            > WINDS
 
General Keywords:
     AIR WEATHER SERVICE
     AWS
     CLIMATOLOGY
     CONTRAILS
     D-VALUE
     DOD
     ECMWF
     IDN_NODE GSFC/USAFETAC
     UACLIMO
     UPPER AIR CLIMATOLOGY
     USAF
     WEATHER
     WIND DIRECTION
     WIND FACTORS
     WIND SPEED
 
Science Review Date: 1994-04-06
 
Revision Date: 1994-04-06
 
Quality Statement:

DATACENTER

Archive: 
   USAFETAC>USAF Environmental Technical Applications Center, Scott AFB
   Data Set ID: UACLIMO 
 
   Contact: , AWS TECHNICAL LIBRARY 
 
            Phone: 618-256-5023

PERSONNEL

Tech Contact: LEWIS, PAUL H.
 
              Phone: 618-256-5412
 
Entry Author: MAJOR, GENE R.
              Hughes STX
              7701 Greenbelt Road, Suite 400
              Greenbelt, MD 20770
              USA
 
              Electronic Mail: INTERNET> MAJOR@NSSDCA.GSFC.NASA.GOV
                               NSI/DECNET> NSSDCA::MAJOR
 
              Phone: (301) 441-4199
 
 
Information in this entry provided by USAFETAC

REFERENCE

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