A New Aerological Sonde for Dense Meteorological Soundings

Abstract A new recoverable aerological sonde has been developed for studying mesoscale atmospheric processes. It allows for precise temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind measurements with (i) high spatial resolution (e.g., up to 100 m) as a parachute dropsonde version and (ii) high temporal resolution as balloon sonde version. The sonde comprises sensor elements of a commercial radiosonde, a 12-channel GPS receiver, a mobile telephone, a microcontroller as a central processing unit, a 4-Mbyte flash memory, a power pack, and a UHF transmitter. Data are stored internally and no data telemetry is used except for GPS data of the landing location, which are transmitted via mobile telephone for sonde recovery. Accurate offline differential GPS (DGPS) wind solutions are obtained by simultaneous GPS reception of a stationary receiver. Optionally, DGPS-based wind data may be obtained by reception of GPS corrections transmitted via VHF or satellite. After removal of selective availability from GPS signals in Ma...