The meteorological observatory Polarstern continuously performs radiosoundings during times of ship operation. Typically, there is one launch to full altitude at 12 UTC every day. Additionally, there often is a launch with a smaller balloon for forecasting purposes (helicopter operations) around 6 UTC. All data published here is left "as recorded", no quality control was applied.

Data files were produced by a proprietary radiosounding system from Vaisala. The format is referred to as "mwx". Technically, the files are zip files comprising several xml-documents.