NASA Earthdata and the Global Hydrometeorological Resource Center Distributed Active Archive Center (GHRC DAAC) have released data acquired by the Airborne Radio Occultation (ARO) instrument during the North American Upstream Feature‑Resolving and Tropopause Uncertainty Reconnaissance Experiment (NURTURE) campaign. The ARO dataset files are available in netCDF-4 format for the period from January 24 through February 19, 2026.
ARO is a passive airborne sensor that detects refractive delays in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) radio signals. ARO uses these measurements to determine vertical profiles of atmospheric temperature and water vapor. It has a horizontal spatial resolution of 150 to 250 km and a vertical resolution of 200-400 m. ARO has a sampling rate of 1 Hz and typically collects about 45 profiles per flight.
During the NURTURE campaign, ARO was deployed aboard the NASA G-III aircraft. The NURTURE campaign focused on quantifying the impact that perturbations poleward of a jet stream have on jet stream variability and high impact weather events. NURTURE provided the first mesoscale observations of antecedent tropopause structure and near-jet environment that lead to high impact weather events. Researchers targeted tropopause polar vortices, dynamics supporting jet superpositions, mesoscale stratosphere-troposphere interactions, and diabatic processes (ESPO 2026).
Browse images of the data are available in PNG format.