The U. S. has been testing radiosonde manufacturer's radiosondes for many decades at test facilities around the country and has developed a number of test techniques for verifying performance. Recent advances in measuring the upper air atmosphere utilizing state-of-the-art referencing technologies and the development of new test techniques within the U.S. are now available for evaluating radiosonde performance to meet the more stringent climate monitoring requirements. Examples of these reference technologies include: NASA's Advanced Temperature Measuring system, Howard University Atmospheric Observatory (HUAO) LIDARs for measuring the mid-to-upper tropospheric moisture, Snow White, high-precision GPS measurements of height, the Integrated Precipitable Water sensor using GPS techniques, various radiometers, and ground-based surface instrumentation to measure clouds and weather. Each reference technology can play an important role in the Consensus Reference System; whereby, data are integrated into information bases from which statistical techniques would be applied to the time-based and pressure/height candidate instrument measurements of say, temperature, moisture variables, cloud bases, and winds as compared to the various references in use. This extended abstract will focus on the Consensus Reference System area with a discussion of the Partial Precipitable Water concept as it pertains to moisture profiles of the atmosphere from different technologies and how the technique may support a wide range of applications in the future.