RAOB

RAOB is the world's most powerful and innovative sounding software available. It is a multi-functional sounding analysis program that can decode over 35 different rawinsonde data formats; create a variety of sounding diagrams; 3-D hodograms; time & distance based vertical cross-sections; mountain (lee) wave turbulence diagrams; and even produces forecast soundings. Display over 100 atmospheric parameters including icing, turbulence, wind shear, clouds, inversions -- plus a unique severe weather analysis table, a cloud parameter table, several thunderstorm analyses options, and graphically interactive diagrams. Vista compatible.

	Classic sounding capabilities You've learned to love sounding analysis programs like older RAOB versions and SHARP. However, no longer are you stuck with MS-DOS. You can get these powerful capabilities in Windows, with all the benefits they provide, such as printing, export, and clipboard capabilities!
	Emagrams and tephigrams too! We haven't forgotten our users in Europe and elsewhere around the world, who are well-acquainted with tephigrams and emagrams. Choosing a style is as simple as ticking off an option in the configuration panel.
	Importing a file It's easy to import a file. All you have to do is choose the filename. In this case, we're looking inside the Digital Atmosphere directory, where some upper air data has been imported already by Digital Atmosphere.
	Sounding list When you've imported a large file with soundings, you'll need to choose which one you want to see. It's easy to do with this selection box.
	Diagram formats You get complete control over how you want the sounding diagram to look. Do you like SKEW-T's, emagrams, or tephigrams? Do you want height scales? Wind barbs? And how do you want heights displayed -- AGL or MSL?
	Pressure and temperature options This panel allows you to choose how high you want the top of the sounding to be -- excellent for getting a closer look at convective instability. You can even choose the background grid to be height instead of pressure! The temperature grid settings allow you to tighten the look of the temperature scales for exacting manual analysis.
	Reference lines options The Reference Lines settings panel allows you to choose colors, intervals, and labels for the adiabats and mixing ratio lines.
	Sounding data options The question is: do you like data plots defined with dots or circles? How about some more questions? Do you like the sounding trace plotted with thin or thick lines? Do you want the wind plots to look like standard barbs or more like vectors? There's a whole lot to choose from here.
	Display preferences Here is where Australian, Brazilian, South African, and other southern hemisphere users can configure the wind barbs to display appropriately for their region. There's also a few other options that will help tidy up the charts to one's liking.
	Algorithm options In the Algorithm Options menu, you can take control over how the turbulence, icing, storm motion, energy-helicity index (EHI), ducting, and shear values are calculated. For example, you can use the FAA or Air Force method of computing clear-air turbulence. For the EHI values you can pick the lowest 1 km or lowest 2 km of SRH values.
	Parcel lifting & CAPE Storm chasers and severe weather forecasters will love this control panel. You get one of the most important controls for computing parcel lifts: the lift method. This allows you to choose which type of CAPE gets displayed: SBCAPE, MUCAPE, and MLCAPE. There are other parcel lift parameters you can set to get that perfect convective analysis.
	Analysis toolbox A convenient toolbox allows you to choose between many options that will be evaluated vertically and displayed on the chart. For instance here we've clicked the clear-air turbulence button. The result is a pink graph showing the levels where turbulence is most likely, based on shear algorithms calculated by RAOB.
	More toolbox selections This is another analysis, this time of contrails. By clicking this button, RAOB evaluates the sounding to see where temperatures and humidity exceeds a certain threshold. The result is plotted on the chart in cyan. This indicates jet contrails are likely to form around the 300 mb level.
	Inversion analyses RAOB evaluates the atmosphere to find temperature inversions, then determines whether they are subsidence, frontal, or radiation along with their heights above ground level. A handy tool for aviation forecasters!
	Sounding analysis summaries You can pop up a summary window that lists all of the analyzed information about the sounding, including inversion data, convective parameters, thermal indices, and so forth. This can be exported, printed, or cut & pasted!
	Online help Finally the program contains the all-important online help, accessible simply by clicking Help or pressing F1. This is where you'll get complete instructions on how to use the program. If you're really stuck, free technical support is available.