Help needed with estimating thermal presence in the past.

Hello! I am relatively new to this group and I come seeking some advice with a peculiar problem (I'd like to thank you for taking the time to read this before-hand, as it is a bit of a tough nut!):

I'm a masters student doing work on Andean Condors in Argentina (mainly in San Carlos de Bariloche). I have a dataset from an experiment performed in 2008, unfortunately the meteorological data was poorly recorded and I am therefore stuck using archive data such as temp. averages at the surface.

I need to find a way of either calculating the strength of thermal activity in the area (I have GPD co-ordinates, which happens to be near an airport) back in 2008 - something that I realise may be impossible. Alternatively I need to estimate the possibility of thermal activity presence - which I guess could be easier.

I realise that to do this I need to know the temperature at different height of the air column, thus I was wondering if any of you know of any way of finding such data back in 2008.

I've tried looking at atmospheric sounding programs such as BLIPMAPS but unfortunately they don't extend to South America.

Again, thanks for reading this even if you can't help, but any help is much appreciated!
Contact me here or feel free to drop me a line on (that's my "unofficial" email address )
Thanks for your help!

There appear to be quite a few historical datasets around archiving NOAA data - HIRS seems to be the magic term, see eg http://data.eol.ucar.edu/datafile/np..._poes_hirs.txt (this dataset doesn'tcover 2008, but may give you search terms to find one that does).