El Niño Rapid Response (ENRR) Field Campaign: Surface Meteorological and Ship Data from the NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown, February-March 2016 (NCEI Accession 0161528)

During January through March 2016, scientists led by the NOAA/Earth System Research Laboratory's Physical Sciences Division conducted NOAA's El Niño Rapid Response (ENRR) Field Campaign. Its goal was to document the ongoing El Niño episode in great detail, and in ways that could help researchers better understand the ways in which this El Niño affected weather in the United States and the impact of various high-resolution observations on weather forecasts. Intensive observations were collected over the central and eastern Pacific ocean from land, ocean, and airborne platforms during the very strong 2015-2016 El Niño. This dataset contains surface meteorological and ship data from the NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown, collected 16 February to 16 March 2016. The data have been corrected for known measurement issues when possible and replaced with bad/missing flags when that was not possible, and have been visually screened for physically unreasonable values.

The data were collected while the ship sailed from Honolulu, Hawaii to the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) buoys along 140°W and 125°W and then to San Diego, California. Instrument elevations ranged from 5 m below the surface of the ocean to about 16 m ASL (above sea level). The averaging/collection period is 1 minute. The following variables are reported: time at end of averaging or collection period (UTC); air_pressure (hPa); air_temperature (C); relative_humidity (%); wind_speed (m s-1); wind_from_direction (degree); sea_surface_temperature (C), collected at 5m depth; downwelling_shortwave_flux_in_air (W m-2); latitude (degree_north); longitude (degree_east); platform_course (degree); platform_azimuth_angle (degree); platform_speed_wrt_ground (m s-1).