Comparisons of aircraft, ship, and buoy meteorological measurements from TOGA COARE

Comparisons of mean ambient temperature, specific humidity, static pressure , and horizontal wind from the five Tropical Ocean-Global Atmosphere Couple d Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE) boundary layer aircraft were obtained from 38 two- and three-aircraft, close-formation, level runs . These, together with consideration of surface measurements from buoys and ships, led to proposed empirical corrections for the aircrafts temperature , humidity, and pressure measurements, minimizing the systematic errors bet ween the aircraft data sets. The aircraft-measured winds were also compared . The TOGA COARE bulk flux algorithm was used to extrapolate the low-level aircraft data to the individual ship and buoy sensor heights for 267 overfl ight comparisons. In addition, all low-level aircraft data and correspondin g ship and buoy data from boundary layer missions were extracted and adjust ed to a 10-m reference height. The recommended aircraft corrections bring t he aircraft-ship-buoy data sets into better agreement, resulting in a consi stent data set for air-sea interaction analyses. Frequency distributions of the 10-m aircraft, ship, and buoy data from the boundary layer missions al so agree.