We seek interest from universities to participate in a university partnership for coordinated radiosonde launches during NAWDIC in January/February 2026.
What is NAWDIC?
The “North Atlantic Waveguide, Dry Intrusion and Downstream Impact Campaign” is a WWRP endorsed project whose aim is to improve the understanding and modelling of mesoscale processes along the dry intrusion (DI) air stream leading to high-impact weather (HIW) in the North Atlantic region in winter. NAWDIC will build directly on insights of the North Atlantic Waveguide and Downstream impact EXperiment (NAWDEX; Schäfler et al. 2018) that observed diabatic processes in ascending air streams and investigated their impact on the tropopause structure. NAWDIC is scheduled for 12 January to 20 February 2026 involving three research aircraft and additional ground-based observations in Europe. Overall, NAWDIC serves as an umbrella for an international measurement effort with strong links to AR RECON and NURTURE led by the United States.
Why coordinated radiosonde launches during NAWDIC?
Thanks to the three AR RECON, NURTURE and NAWDIC missions all taking place in January/February 2026, it will become possible to carry out simultaneous measurement flights over the northern hemisphere, from the western Pacific to the eastern Atlantic. This will allow to estimate more accurately the atmospheric state at the time of forecast initialization, also through dropsondes from the various involved aircrafts. The deployment of additional radiosondes would complement this global setup and provide unique opportunities for data denial experiments following the campaign, with the aim to quantify the added value that each additional observation would bring to the forecast quality. All radiosonde data will be sent to the GTS and will therefore be directly available for assimilation into global numerical weather prediction models in real time.
What will participants in the partnership do?
Participating universities will employ interested undergraduate or graduate students, led by a faculty member, to perform radiosonde launches coordinated with the NAWDIC operations center in Shannon (Ireland) during the campaign time frame. Universities are encouraged to involve student groups (e.g., forecasting / instrumentation classes, etc.) to help staff launches. Therefore, in addition to the science goal of increasing land-based observations for forecast improvement, the project also includes an educational goal of student training in gathering observations with real-time impacts.
Unfortunately, we will not be able to provide funding for this initiative, implying that university programs would need to cover the costs for the radiosonde launches and would also need to have access to their own radiosonde launching system. In addition to coordinating and staffing the launches, we encourage the lead faculty and students to participate virtually in daily one-hour NAWDIC weather briefings at 1600 UTC during January and February 2026.
What do we offer to the participants?
On the technical side, we will offer an FTP connection where data in BUFR format can be sent so that they reach the GTS on time. Also, if there are problems with writing data into BUFR format, we are very happy to assist.
All participating institutions will be listed as project partners on the NAWDIC web page and acknowledged in peer reviewed campaign overview articles. Furthermore, we are planning to submit an overview article about this EUROP initiative to the Journal of the European Meteorological Society shortly after the campaign.
What is beyond the European partnership?
This initiative has direct links to a corresponding initiative coordinated by AR RECON. A pilot project was successfully conducted in the U.S. with 9 participating universities launching 100 radiosondes. Here are some impressions:
“Students loved being involved in the launches, especially knowing the connection back to AR Recon.”
“The launches facilitated community engagement across campuses with involvement from faculty/staff across departments, and collected data was actively used by students in the classroom, highlighted by local broadcast stations, and incorporated into National Weather Service forecasts.”
How can I get involved?
Please fill out the survey below indicating your level of interest and ability to participate. Thank you very much!
