Topband: Topband Propagation

[Ford Peterson]

Bob Brown-NM7M wrote:

> Ford,
> 
> What I am proposing amounts to using the control point method, of 
> HF propagation, to find the variables which most influence MF
> propagation.  But the data is local, small-scale, from above 30 km
> altitude.

...snip...

> BTW, I am quite familiar with radiosondes and ballooning.  I have
> launched several hundred scientific payloads on balloons, from the
> Arctic to Antarctic.  My balloons were all polyethelyne and reached
> a few mB pressure altitude; radiosonde balloons, alas, are rubber
> and far less reliable.  So, with luck, 30 km would be an upper limit
> But far better than sea-level.
> 
> 73,
> 
> Bob, NM7M

Bob, and others...

I have access to the Radiosonde data needed for the entire US (world?  I dunno--never looked elsewhere but it does appear to be in the data).  I can provide the following from (today): 86 Radiosondes that were launched at 00:00Z on Jan-08-2005 (hours ago) from various lat/lons around the US.

The data contains various heights every two to three hundred meters from the ground level at launch until the balloon bursts.  Just scanning the 86 Radiosondes, I see that they burst at altitudes of 24km (78,000 ft) to well over 40km (131,000 ft).  So the high level data has holes in it.  The data contains the following info:

Pressure (tenths of millibars)
Height (meters)
Temp (tenths of degrees Celsius)
Dewpoint (tenths of degrees Celsius)
Wind Direction (degrees)
Wind Speed (either knots or tenths of meters/second)

Today's Radiosonde data over the US contains some 8,600 data sets at various heights and locations.

If this data was superimposed over propagation path statistics, could this provide an indicator of what is going on?  It seems to me, if refraction is occurring along certain paths, (read: skewing, spotlighting, peaks, nulls) then the atmospheric data at altitude would support the thesis.  Does this sound correct?

Ford-N0FP
ford at cmgate.com