TAMDAR Discussion Board

TAMDAR verified RUC moisture

Posted By: Lyle Alexander
Date: 8-May-05 1646Z

We have a rather uneventful weather day today over the Ohio Valley (as opposed to yesterday and what we expect the next couple of days). I had seen the ETA moisture profiles which looked fairly dry and in fact the skies are fairly clear under a fairly sharp 500 millibar ridge overhead. I saw a TAMDAR sounding for an aircraft which landed at LEX at 1526Z. It looked surprisingly moist in the 800-650 millibar range, nearly saturated 681 mb. I took a look at both the ETA and RUC forecast soundings from the 12Z run for that area. The RUC was much closer to the information that was indicated by TAMDAR. I don't beleive we could have verified the accuracy of the RUC without the TAMDAR report. As it turns out, this event should not have a significant impact on aviation or sensible weather except perhaps some scattered to broken cloudiness later on. On other days this could make a noticeable difference on model output. Lyle