In recent weeks the NOAA Profiler Network has been transitioned from the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Global Systems Division (GSD) (formerly the Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL)) to the National Weather Service (NWS). The network transition also includes the reassignment of the ESRL/GSD profiler branch to the NWS. Due to budget limitations, the NWS has decided to cease support for the CAP program, which had been maintained by the ESRL/GSD profiler branch. In order to keep this important program going, ESRL/GSD will be transferring the CAP program to another ESRL/GSD project, the Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS). This is a good fit since MADIS is also in the business of collecting other-agency meteorological observations, quality controlling them, and distributing them to interested parties in the meteorological community.
Please note that as a result of resource limitations in ESRL/GSD we will not be able to support all of the outputs that have been made available by the CAP program. There will now only be one format of output file available, which is the MADIS "Multi-Agency Profiler" dataset. This dataset has been available from MADIS since June 1, 2002, and an archive of saved real-time data is available back to that date. The MADIS files include all of the information contained in the CAP netCDF files that had been previously available, although in a different netCDF format. The data are available via ftp, ldm, or OPeNDAP. MADIS provides software that can be used to read the files. Information and download capability for the software can be found at our website.
For more information see the following MADIS URLs:
MADIS home page
Data application
Multi-Agency Profiler Dataset