NEON sonic anemometer and inertial navigation system data, NEON Headquarters, 2014

Eddy-covariance measurements are often used to directly monitor the surface-atmosphere exchange of shear, heat and trace gases between an ecosystem and the atmosphere. For this purpose high-frequency (≥10 Hz) data streams of a 3-D sonic anemometer and an infrared gas analyzer are combined. Depending on the specifics of each site and installation, the sonic anemometer wind measurement can be prone to distortions exceeding 10% of the uncorrected values. Examples are excessive transducer shadowing at sloped sites due to large angle of attack relative to the average flow lines, as well as oscillations of tower and boom support structures. NEON staff conducted a study to evaluate the applicability of INSs for tracking sonic anemometer alignment during angled deployment at sloped sites to align with the horizontal flow lines, and for correcting tower and boom oscillations.
This dataset contains all sonic anemometer and INS in-situ test data in the form of a multivolume .zip archive. The .zip.001, .zip.002 files can be downloaded individually, and need to be in the same folder for extraction with software such as 7-zip. For extraction the software should be pointed only to the .zip.001 volume, and the contents of all subsequent volumes are detected and extracted automatically. Alternatively, it is possible to “select all” during the download operation. However, the resulting .zip container is quite large (~15 GB) and thus more prone to network interruptions. Also, a “headers error” can be expected during initial extraction of the container, and a subsequent extraction of the multivolume archive is still necessary.
The archive includes three folders “3dsonic”, “sbg”, and “xsens”, each containing hourly .csv.gz files for one of the three principal instruments, compressed in the GNU zip format. These can be extracted with software like 7-zip or directly read using common data analysis environments such as the R language for Statistical Computing [base::read.table()].