Meteorological Systems

The Meteorological Systems Group of Lockheed Martin Sippican's Sea-Air Systems Division is an international supplier of expendable weather data gathering instruments and associated ground systems for government and military customers including the National Weather Service and the U.S. Department of Defense.

The company is a leading international supplier of radiosondes and upper air processing systems, with customers in over 70 countries throughout the world. A variety of system and radiosonde configurations are available to meet the requirements of synoptic, military, and research/scientific users, for both fixed and mobile sounding applications.  The company's next generation digital radiosonde design and advanced upper air system software were featured at this year's AMS Meeting. 

Lockheed Martin is the only company in the world capable of providing a single, fully integrated system for performing shipboard radiosonde and expendable bathythermograph (XBT) soundings.  The capability to obtain and integrate radiosonde and XBT data in one system provides the user with significant operational advantages and cost savings, at a time when the importance of air/sea interaction is clearly recognized in the forecast community.

The Meteorological Systems group is currently working on the Automated Meteorological Profiling System, or AMPS, developed under a contract for Orbital Sciences and the U.S. Air Force.  AMPS has the ability to collect data from up to six radiosondes in flight simultaneously.  The Met group is also working on the National Weather Service's RRS program.

 

What to do if you have found a radiosonde (39 KB pdf file)

Radiosondes are carried into the atmosphere by weather balloons. While ascending they measure a combination of temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, ozone, and wind velocity and radio the data to a ground system for processing. They are used around the world to gather data for weather predicting.

Two models of ground systems receive and process radiosonde data. The GPS W-9000 is compatible with radiosondes that use GPS for measuring wind velocity. The W-9000 is compatible with radiosondes utilizing other wind velocity measuring techniques such as LORAN, radiotheodolite, or RADAR transponder.