From the archive

Famous soundings

The actual radiosonde data behind historic weather — each card opens the real sounding in the explorer, with the full analysis (parcels, ECAPE, hodograph, climatological ranking) computed live in your browser. First load of an archived station downloads its whole period of record, so give it a few seconds.

20 May 2013 · 12Z · Norman, Oklahoma

The morning of the Moore EF5

Hours before the tornado that crossed Moore, the 12Z Norman sounding showed the loaded gun: a capped, extremely unstable airmass with a strongly curved hodograph.

31 May 2013 · 12Z · Norman, Oklahoma

El Reno — the widest tornado ever measured

Eleven days later, the setup for the 2.6-mile-wide El Reno tornado that killed three veteran storm researchers. Compare its hodograph with Moore's.

3 April 1974 · 12Z · Nashville, Tennessee

The Super Outbreak

The morning sounding ahead of the largest tornado outbreak then recorded — 148 tornadoes in 24 hours, thirty of them violent (F4/F5), across thirteen states.

27 May 1997 · 12Z · Fort Worth, Texas

Jarrell — the F5 that shouldn't have happened

Weak shear, no obvious trigger, yet extreme instability produced a nearly stationary F5. The infamous case of CAPE overwhelming a marginal kinematic environment.

28 June 2021 · 00Z · Quillayute, Washington

The Pacific Northwest heat dome

During the deadliest weather event in Canadian history and Portland's 116 °F day — check the 500 hPa height and thickness against nine decades of climatology on this one.

13 July 1995 · 12Z · Lincoln, Illinois

The Chicago heat wave

The sounding during the heat catastrophe that killed over 700 people in five days — extreme low-level moisture under a subsidence inversion, PWAT and 850 temps near records.

15 January 2026 · 00Z · Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska

The polar night, top to bottom

Not an event — a specimen. The northernmost US sounding in deep winter: surface inversion, a saturated dendritic zone, and the tropopause below 9 km.

11 July 2026 · 00Z · Ponape, Caroline Islands

The deep tropics, textbook edition

Nearly 5,000 J/kg of CAPE, 80% column relative humidity, an equilibrium level within 200 m of the independently computed 16 km tropopause — the tropical atmosphere doing everything by the book.