JANUARY 2012 | 14 F or over a half-century, field cam- paigns have played a central role in advancing the atmospheric sciences. Although recent decades have witnessed organized efforts at cataloging and archiving field cam- paign data for both United States and international experiments, largely through the auspices of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), data from campaigns from the 1950s into the 1980s have not been systematically collected and archived at a central location. Here we report on an effort to take steps to correct this situation, with an initial focus on atmospheric sounding data. Furthermore, we make an appeal to the international community to as- sist in this effort by identifying and locating observations from past field campaigns and reporting this infor- mation to our project website. Invariably, field campaigns involve substan- tial resources to conduct special or intensive observations over selected locations around the globe. The resulting data have been invaluable as the main observational bases for advancing tropical, midlatitude, and polar research, much of it involving processes associated with clouds and ARCHIVES LEGACY ATMOSPHERIC SOUNDING DATASET PROJECT BY RICHARD H. JOHNSON, STEVEN F. WILLIAMS, AND P AUL E. CIESIELSKI precipitation systems. Examples of such past field campaigns are the 1969 Barbados Oceanographic and Meteorological Experiment (BOMEX); the 1974 GARP Atlantic Tropical Experiment (GATE); the 1985 Oklahoma-Kansas Preliminary Experi- ment for STORM-Central (OK PRE-STORM); and the 1992–93 Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE). These field campaign datasets have been collected and used by various organizations and research groups around the world. Their archival status varies from one field program to another since no consis- tent data management strategy has been applied over this long period of time. Figure 1 shows some of the archival media (e.g., 9-track magnetic tapes, micro- fiche, paper printouts, etc.) on which these earlier datasets are stored. Those who wish to access these data generally have to contact a variety of places to locate and obtain the data files, and in many cases AFFILIATIONS: JOHNSON AND CIESIELSKI —Department of Atmo- spheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colo- rado; WILLIAMS—National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Richard H. Johnson, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523 E-mail: Johnson@atmos.colostate.edu DOI:10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00092.1 ©2012 American Meteorological Society FIG. 1. A photo depicting some of the archival media used to store data for many of the early field experiments. Plans are to extract data from such media and place them in a common format at a central archive.