Since August 1998, the Plymouth State College (PSC) Meteorology Program has been archiving hourly surface and 00/12 UTC radiosonde data and later began saving additional data. The more recently added data include CONUS MDR and RCM radar composites, daily global sea surface temperature maps, and other data. NCDC and FSL North American radiosonde archives were also collected and reformatted to increase the upper air archive back to 1957. Annual NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis CDROM data were also rebuilt to provide global upper air analysis coverage back through 1953.

Most data are stored in both raw and decoded form and can be easily accessed online to generate text or graphical products. Generally, observations can be retrieved in either raw or plain language format. Users have the ability to select from a variety of map regions. They can generally plot and/or contour data and in some cases, overlay different data sets. Users can also generate thermodynamic diagrams or hodograms from the upper air archives.

This user friendly interface to archived data has been used frequently in a number of PSC research studies, student projects, and case studies by providing a solid online library of data. Users now spend more time on analyzing data rather than on extraction, which greatly improves their productivity.

This paper will cover the features and use of the PSC pages to access archived data.