Another option to define atmospheric conditions is to use upper air soundings. These are profiles of temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind speed and direction measured by weather balloons or similar devices.
The University of Wyoming - College of Engineering - Department of Atmospheric Sciences has a comprehensive collection of atmospheric soundings on their website, accessible here.
For this example, we will use the sounding from 83779 SBMT Marte Civ Observations at 04 Feb 2019, which can be accessed using this URL: http://weather.uwyo.edu/cgi-bin/sounding?region=samer&TYPE=TEXT%3ALIST&YEAR=2019&MONTH=02&FROM=0500&TO=0512&STNM=83779
Initialize a new Environment instance:
.. jupyter-execute::
from rocketpy import Environment
url = "http://weather.uwyo.edu/cgi-bin/sounding?region=samer&TYPE=TEXT%3ALIST&YEAR=2019&MONTH=02&FROM=0500&TO=0512&STNM=83779"
env = Environment()
env.set_atmospheric_model(type="wyoming_sounding", file=url)
env.plots.atmospheric_model()
Note
The wyoming_sounding does not require the date parameter to be set, as the data is already provided in the URL.
Important
From September 30th, 2024, this model is no longer available since NOAA has discontinued the Ruc Soundings public service. The following message is displayed on the website: "On Monday, September 30, a number of legacy websites were permanently removed. These sites were no longer being maintained and did not meet security and design requirements mandated by NOAA. They were intended for research purposes and are not designed for operational use, such as for commercial purposes or the safety of life and property."
Another option for upper air soundings is NOAA's Ruc Soundings. This service allows users to download virtual soundings from numerical weather prediction models such as GFS, RAP, and NAM, and also real soundings from the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA).
These options can be retrieved as a text file in GSD format. However,
RocketPy no longer provides a dedicated set_atmospheric_model type for
NOAA RUC Soundings.
Note
Select ROABs as the initial data source, specify the station through its WMO-ID, and opt for the ASCII (GSD format) button.
If you need to use RUC-sounding-like data in RocketPy, convert it to one of the supported workflows:
- Use :ref:`custom_atmosphere` after parsing the text data.
- Use :ref:`reanalysis` or :ref:`forecast` with NetCDF/OPeNDAP sources.
Note
The leading r in the URL string is used to indicate a raw string, which is useful when dealing with backslashes in URLs.