A Tropical Wind Climatology Derived from Aircraft Data, 1960-1973

Long term monthly mean winds were derived from a collection of aircraft data, which were obtained from two sources: 1) operational Global Telecommunication System (GTS) reports collected by the Honolulu National Weather Service and the U.S. Navy, and 2) aircraft logs from many routes which often were not reported over the GTS. Aircraft winds were summarized for each month in 5-degree latitude-longitude squares. Monthly-averaged rawinsonde data were then combined with these summarized aircraft winds in manual analyses of streamlines and isotachs. This dataset's 2.5-degree grids of wind speed and direction were digitized from the manual analyses.