Soundings were carried out on daily basis by using Vaisala tethersonde system DigiCORA TT12 with maximum altitude of 2000 m. The instrumentation consisted of 7 m3 helium filled balloon for lifting sondes, an electrical winch, three sondes suspended on the tether line below the balloon at approximately 20 m vertical intervals, and a ground station. Limited by the wind speed, however, soundings were not possible to perform every day. Each profile in dataset includes ascending and descending profiles of variables. Dataset presents raw data where no averaging over the sondes and heights is done. Yet, data is checked manually for errors. Some distinct obviously erroneous signals and spike values were removed from the data. More about the methods is described in ReadMe text file.

The melt of snow and sea ice in Svalbard and its fjords is strongly controlled by the radiative and turbulent surface fluxes. The fluxes depend, among others, on the structure of and processes in the ABL. Over a complex topography, such as Svalbard mountains and fjords, the state of the ABL is not well known. It is affected by the synoptic-scale flow conditions, which vary between cases of advection of warm, marine air masses from open ocean and cold-air outbreaks from the north or east. Data of vertical profiles of atmospheric variables were collected as a part of the project "Atmospheric boundary layer and its interaction with snow and sea ice in Svalbard fjords". The principal objective of the project was to better understand and quantify the processes in the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) over complex topography in Svalbard and their interaction with the snow and sea ice surface. Soundings archive consists 17 high-resolution vertical profiles of the measured atmospheric characteristics (air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, and air pressure) acquired from the tethersonde soundings campaign in Ny-Ålesund (Svalbard archipelago) between 21 March and 2 April in 2009.

European Centre for Arctic Environmental Research (ARCFAC). Target financed project SF0180049s09 of the Ministry of Education and Research of the Republic of Estonia. 6th EU Framework Programme project DAMOCLES (Grant 18509).