30 years of upper air soundings on board of R/V POLARSTERN (1982-12-29 to 2012-11-25)

The research vessel and supply icebreaker POLARSTERN is the flagship of the Alfred-Wegener-Institut in Bremerhaven (Germany) and one of the infrastructural pillars of German Antarctic research. Since its commissioning in 1982, POLARSTERN has conducted 30 campaigns to Antarctica (157 legs, mostly austral summer), and 29 to the Arctic (94 legs, northern summer). Usually, POLARSTERN is more than 300 days per year in operation and crosses the Atlantic Ocean in a meridional section twice a year. The first radiosonde on POLARSTERN was released on the 29th of December 1982, two days after POLARSTERN started on its maiden voyage to the Antarctic. And these daily soundings have continued up to the present. Due to the fact that POLARSTERN has reliably and regularly been providing upper air observations from data sparse regions (oceans and polar regions), the radiosonde data are of special value for researchers and weather forecast services alike. In the course of 30 years (1982-12-29 to 2012-11-25) a total of 12378 radiosonde balloons were started on POLARSTERN. All radiosonde data can now be found here. Each dataset contains the directly measured parameters air temperature, relative humidity and air pressure, and the derived altitude, wind direction and wind speed. 432 datasets additionally contain ozone measurements.