The October 2000 field campaign in the Salt Lake Basin for the Vertical Transport and Mixing eXperiment (VTMX) involved more than a dozen different organizations, collecting data with many different kinds of meteorological instruments. The upper air instruments included radiosondes, tethersondes, sodars, RASS, MAPR, and other RF profilers. The surface observations were generally more conventional, but came from many different agencies and networks. Most of the surface data are routinely gathered and put into consistent formats by the University of Utah Meteorology Department. Those data have been augmented with VTMX observations from manned locations and automated stations.

The processing and consolidation of these data into files of uniform format and similar temporal and vertical resolution has been completed and the methods used and difficulties encountered will be discussed. With the data together in consistent format, it is possible to apply objective analysis techniques to generate three-dimensional meteorological fields. The Winds on Critical Streamline Surfaces (WOCSS) analysis approach has been used so that the very important interactions of the flow with the topography during stable conditions is accounted for. The flow surfaces generated as part of the WOCSS calculations were used for interpolating potential temperatures, from which derived quantities, such as Richardson Number can be estimated.

The paper will briefly describe the analysis methodology and present results that will be compared with ARPS mesoscale simulations. WOCSS performance in the Salt Lake area will also be evaluated by using reduced input data sets and comparing the analysis with unused observational data. The planned uses of the analyses for studying flow patterns at different scales will be discussed.

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under the auspices of the Environmental Meteorology Program of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research.