SPRINGSCM

Executive Summary The Spring 2000 SCM IOP was conducted March 1-22, 2000, concurrent with the Cloud IOP 2000. The cloud radars and associated instrumentation fielded at three supplemental sites (SF1, SF2, and the Blackwell/Tonkawa airport) provided documentation of the spatial variability of cloud and atmospheric state variables that the SCM must treat in an average sense. Knowledge of this SCM subgrid-scale variability may prove valuable in assessing the limitations of current GCM parameterizations and lead to their improvement. Also, the data sets from the Cloud IOP will allow evaluation of the use of time-averaged statistics at a single point to represent spatial statistics of atmospheric variables at the SGP site. The rate of successful soundings was excellent for this IOP. Out of the 840 soundings (168 per site), there were only 7 missing soundings (<1%), 10 that terminated below 3 km (~1%), and 8 the terminated between 3 and 10 km (1%). Soundings that are below expectation are tabulated by launch site and reveal some site-specific problems:

Problem Soundings
Launch Site	CF	BF1	BF4	BF5	BF6	Total
Missing	2	3	1	0	1	7
< 3 km	4	3	2	1	0	10
3-10 km	1	3	3	0	1	8

A high rate of successful soundings was achieved at B5 and B6, while there was a little more difficulty at B1 (and even the CF). There were no patterns in the missing or reduced sounding data that would create problems for subsequent SCM analyses.