Jason Boggs
I am curious how some of you find current upper level data. I e-mailed T. Vasquez about this question and got a good response and was wondering what everybody else thought about this. I know soundings come out every 12 hours at 12Z and OOZ. Suppose your looking at data around noon for a possible chase day and want to find the current 700mb wind speed. The morning sounding with the true data is now 6 hrs. old so how can you find the current upper level air data such as temp and wind speed? Remember that model data only gives a forecast and does not give the true current upper level wind data. What do some of you look at to get this data? I heard that the RUC model is probably the best bet since it ingests several aspects of meteorological data. I know that soundings are very valuable to storm forecasting but I generally don't rely on them much at all. I know that special soundings are done on active days but there have been many active days when special soundings were not launched.