Sadler's Tropical Wind Climatology, 1960-1973

Long term monthly mean winds which Sadler derived from his collection of aircraft data (which we have in DS365.0. [https://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds365.0/]) and average rawinsonde data. The aircraft data were obtained from two sources: operational GTS reports collected in Honolulu and the FHWF; and aircraft logs from many routes which often were not reported over the GTS. The aircraft winds were summarized for each month in 5-degree latitude-longitude squares. The average monthly rawinsonde data were then combined with these in manual analyses of streamlines and isotachs. The 2.5- degree grids of wind speed and direction were manually read from these.

Unless you have a special interest in this dataset, DSS recommends that you use one of our reanalysis datasets, such as ds090.2 [https://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds090.2/]. That's because those are based on a more complete collection of observations, improved analysis methods, and are provided in a common modern format (GRIB).