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Key to maps and tables

Track and operations overview maps

	Relevant weather systems trajectories, 6 hourly marks: filled circle: depression empty circle: trough white wedge: open wave filled wedge: wave depression thin lines: links simultenous marks.
	Other symbols for weather systems (from top to bottom): comma cloud weak vorticity maximum significant fronts weak convective cloud cluster upper-level anomaly of potential vorticity P and its trajectory.
	Land radiosounding stations launch frequency (from top to bottom): 2 soundings/day 4 soundings/day on alert 4 soundings/day permanent 8 soundings/day on alert.
	FASTEX-dedicated research ships, at their intensive sounding position (dot), from left to right: Ægir, Suroît, Knorr, Victor Bugaev. Arrow indicates ship displacement when this happened.
	Sketches of relevant flight tracks: Orange: LearJet, US-C130 Dark red: Gulfstream IV Blue: one of the MSA tracks chosen from generally combined flights.

Summary images, maps and tables

GOES and METEOSAT infra-red images, centered on the system of interest, extracted from the on-line Atlas.	Operational ARPEGE (from Météo-France) analyses, extracted from the online Atlas, on the same area as the images. Continuous contours: mean sea level pressure, interval 5 mbar. Shading and dashed lines: 2m air temperature, interval 2°C.	On occasions, this 850 mbar map (below) is shown. Light blue lines are geopotential. Red lines show absolute vorticity maxima, dark blue lines vorticity minima.

These images are accompanied by a short table describing the main steps of the life-cycle of the system of interest. This table is self-explicit.

Operations summary tables

The operations summary tables are meant to provide some details on the actions mentioned in the overview map.

The tables contain the following information:

• US-RS

  date/time of change to 6h soundings of the US upper-air stations (or continuation symbol ® )

  date/time of change back to 12h soundings of the US upper-air stations (or continuation symbol ®)

• Ship	date of mid-intensive sounding period	duration of intensive sounding period	approximate number of high-resolution profiles available in the Data Base for this period
  	time of mid-intensive sounding period	Ship position during the intensive sounding period.

• Aircraft	mid-flight date	flight duration	number of high-resolution profiles available in the Data Base
  	mid-flight time	For Multiscale Sampling Area (MSA) flights: type of flight plans: ss: systematic survey, a system relative array-like pattern that allow a systematic description of the core of the system by both Doppler radar(s) and dropsondes. mi: mesoscale investigation, aircraft fly more independently from one another and concentrate on specific mesoscale features such as rainbands.

• European-RS

  date/time of change to 3h soundings of the european upper-air stations (or continuation symbol ® )

  duration of the 3h soundings period.

  number of stations involved in the sequence of 3h soundings.

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