CAMEX-4 NOAA WP-3D Flight Level Data

Table of Contents

General Information
Tape Naming Conventions
AOC file Documentation
Contact Information

General Information

The Convection And Moisture EXperiments (CAMEX) are a series of field research investigations sponsored by the Earth Science Enterprise of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). CAMEX-4 focused on the study of tropical cyclone (hurricane) development, tracking, intensification, and landfalling impacts using NASA-funded aircraft and surface remote sensing instrumentation.

The fourth field campaign in the CAMEX series (CAMEX-4) ran from 16 August to 25 September, 2001 and was based out of Jacksonville Naval Air Station, Florida. An important addition to CAMEX-4 was the participation of the NOAA weather reconnaissance WP-3D that collected radar, video and microphysical data.

The NOAA WP-3D Orion aircraft collects numerous in-situ meteorological measurements along with navigation and aircraft state parameters during each flight (these data are similar to that collected with the NASA DC-8 ICATS system). The WP-3D data are encoded on 8mm tape in what is called the "AOC Standard Tape Format". Examples of meteorological data include total temperature, dew point, liquid water content and dynamic pressure (from several sensors). Aircraft parameters include angle of attack, airspeed, slip angle, etc.

Tape Naming Conventions

Data is saved to 8mm tapes. They use the following naming convention:

c4p3flt_yyyymmddH1

where c4p3flt indicates these are flight level data collected on the WP-3D during CAMEX-4
yyyymmdd indicates year, month and day and
H1 indicates the header type for the AOC data.

AOC file documentation

The files on these tapes are in AOC file format. Documentation about this is found at http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/format/Standard_tape.html or at our anonymous FTP site at https://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/pub/doc/camex4/c4p3flt. Questions concerning data extraction should be directed to adir@aoml.noaa.gov.

Contact information

To order these data or for further information, please contact:

Global Hydrology Resource Center
User Services
320 Sparkman Drive
Huntsville, AL 35805
Phone: 256-961-7932
E-mail: support-ghrc@earthdata.nasa.gov
Web: http://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/