The goal is to convert the data from the aircraft into a format that the RAOB program can read.

To start, open the terminal and access the flight data in the Aircraft folder. From here, select the date you want to work with and open that folder. In this folder, there should be another folder named PostProcessing. Open that folder and look for a file that ends in “.air.1Hz.gz”. The file should be zipped, so you can unzip it if you like. cplot will plot it either way, but if you want to unzip it, enter the command “gunzip” followed by the file ending in “.air.1Hz.gz”.

Enter the command “cplot2” followed by the file name (without “.gz”). A gray window will open up. This window has many options for plotting data on the x and y axes. Click the box next to “time” in the x-axis column and the box next to “Press/alt(m)” in the y-axis column. Once these are selected, click on the “plot” box on the upper menu and hit “Plot xy”. This will create a chart showing the altitude on the y-axis and the time on the x-axis. The goal now is to change the time interval so that only the ascent/descent is shown in the chart.

To find this time interval, click in the “tools” box on the upper menu and hit “grab time”. Then click and drag the mouse from the left to the right side of the ascent on the graph (it must be left to right. Moving from right to left will not work because the time interval will be backwards and the graph will not plot). Once you do this, a red box should appear over the area that you selected. Click “plot” in the upper menu and “plot xy” in the following menu. This will change the time interval to the selected interval. Repeat this until only the ascent is plotted in the chart.

With the time interval selected, close out of the cplot2 windows and return to the terminal. Now, use the subset command to create a copy of the data file that only has the selected time interval. Enter “subset” in the command line to get the proper syntax. This will tell you exactly what to type. For this process, only the start time and the end time are needed from the options. It will also need an output file. The output file name should look exactly the same as the input file name but with “.ascent” added into it. For example, if the input file ends in “.air.1Hz”, the output file name should end in “.air.ascent.1Hz”. Enter in the necessary info and hit enter. This creates the file.

Before moving on, move the “.air.ascent.1Hz” file out of the PostProcessing folder and into the Analysis folder. If there is not an Analysis folder, make one.

The final step is to use “convert_undtoraob” to make this new file readable by the RAOB program. Enter “convert_undtoraob” to get the proper syntax. For the output file name, name it the same as the input file name, but with “.raob” instead of “.1Hz”. For example, if the input file ends in “.air.ascent.1Hz”, the output file should end in “.air.ascent.raob”. Enter in the necessary information and hit enter. There will now be a file that can be entered into the RAOB program.

We would like to get the aircraft data into RAOB so we can plot the data against soundings and satellite data. For comparison purposes as well as quality control.

Process_raw will intake raw level one data, the *.sea data and output *.serialA.aimms.raw and *.serialB.aimms.raw

aimms2humidity takes the serialA and B data and outputs *.humidity.aimms.data.

This program adds the altitude from serial B to A. It will also calculate dew point from Relative Humidity and Temperature. (We calculate dew point instead of using dew point from a different instrument because we only want to use aimms data).

The output file will have the following columns:

• Pressure
• Height
• Temperature
• Dew Point
• Wind Direction
• Wind Speed
• Relative Humidity

Takes in *.humidity.aimms.data files and outputs *.asc.serial.aimms.temp and/or *desc.serial.aimms.temp.

Output is the flight data when the plane is ascending or descending. Times found from cplot, using time intervals.

Mali Summer 2008 Flight times:

Mali Summer 2008

Saudi Spring 2009 Flight times:

Saudi Spring 2009

Program takes in *.asc.* and/or *.desc.* files and outputs a FSL formatted data file to be put into the RAOB Program. Output file names should be in the format of FSLformal<doy>.txt