Summary of Winds Aloft - WBAN 120

Summary of Winds Aloft - WBAN 120 is a historical manuscript set archived at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). These forms consist of wind direction and wind speed at specified heights above the surface obtained from pibals and rawinsonds. These are listed by station, year, month, day, and by hour of observation. Scheduled hours of observations changed on June 1, 1957 from 03, 09, 15 and 21 Greenwich Mean Time to 00, 06, 12 and 18 GMT. Provisions exist on these forms for listing wind direction and speed at heights up to 42,000 meters. The first page contains data in 12 five-column fields from the surface through 6,000 meters. Page 2 contains data from 7,000 through 18,000 meters, when available, etc. Heights have varied over the years and, in general, wind observations reached greater heights in the early 1960's than in the 1940's or 1950's. High level wind data (above 50,000 meters) are available in published and summarized forms for selected stations in the rocketsonde network. These archived forms can be found in Rocketsonde Observations, DSI-5850 (C00074). The major parameters that make up this file are wind direction (16 point and calm) versus wind speed (m/s, kts, mph) group tabulations. Also included are monthly or seasonal; 1. Standard deviation of east components, 2. Standard deviation of north components, 3. Standard vector deviation of wind velocity, 4. Correlation coefficient of north and east components, 5. Average wind speed, 6. Scalar wind speed, 7. Ratio of standard deviations, 8. Standard deviation of wind components along the major axis of the distribution, 9. Standard deviation of wind components perpendicular to the major axis of the distribution, 10. Angle of rotation of the major axis of the wind distribution counter- clockwise from East-West direction, 11. Standard deviation of wind speeds.