Why must radiosonde data be checked for accuracy?
Stations in the NWS network take a total of about 75,000 observations each year. Each observation can contain thousands of measurements of air pressure, temperature, relative humidity, wind direction, and wind speed. Radiosonde defects, ground equipment problems, and/or atmospheric conditions aloft result in some soundings containing erroneous data. Some errors are easy to detect, such as excessive cooling of the temperature with height (i.e. super-adiabatic lapse rate). Others, such as identifying temperature errors caused by solar radiation, can be difficult.
