The intent of this web site is to assist new users of NCAR/EOL/RAF-produced
aircraft data if they would like to use R in their data analysis projects.
The intent here is to provide “layers”, starting with a very simple
guide to constructing preliminary plots and extending to more advanced
uses of R, RStudio, and knitr to produce manuscripts and reproducible
and documented data-analysis projects.The emphasis here is on “Ranadu”,
an R package that is intended to facilitate use of the data archives
produced by the data systems on the NSF/NCAR/EOL/RAF research aircraft.
(NSF=National Science Foundation; NCAR=National Center for Atmospheric
Research; EOL=Earth Observing Laboratory; RAF=Research Aviation Facility)
All the recent data files are in netCDF format, so that is the format
emphasized here. Those files contain measurements made in field campaigns
that use the NSF research aircraft operated by NCAR, presently consisting
of a C-130 and a Gulfstream V. A list of recent projects is available
at this EOL web page,
and data requests can be made via links on that page. Information
regarding the instruments and the processing algorithms are available
at these respective web sites: https://www.eol.ucar.edu/aircraft-instrumentation
and ProcessingAlgorithms.pdf.
The latter also provides references to the netCDF format, the variable
names in common use, and algorithms used to calculate the variables
in the data files.
