data formats

Advancing Water Resources Research and Management

Symposium on Water Resources and the World Wide Web
Seattle, Washington, December 5-9, 1999

For the real-time data, he Daily data, HADS daily totals, and HADS time series' are stored in separate files for each day

The format of the daily files is as follows:

index to the station information (signed short, 2 bytes)
check character (4th char of station name) (1 byte)
tot rain reported in period (signed short, 2 bytes)

The format of the HADS totals files is as follows:

index to the station information (signed short, 2 bytes)
check character (4th char of station name) (1 byte)
tot rain reported in period (signed short, 2 bytes)
number of reports in period (signed short, 2 bytes)
index to the time-series data, or -1 if no time-series data exists (signed short, 2bytes)

The format of the HADS time series files is as follows:

For the case when total reported rain > 0,
1. number of reports in period (signed short, 2 bytes)
2. for each hour reported:
  1. hour (1 byte)
  2. rain in hundredths of an inch (signed short, 2 bytes)
For the case when total reported rain = 0 AND the number of reports is less than 24,
1. minus the number of reports in period (signed short, 2 bytes)
2. for each hour reported:
  1. hour (1 byte)
(For the case of 24 reports and no rain, no time series record exists.)

For the HPD display, the data are made available as ascii files, of which this is an example

010140 +32.23 -087.42 00000 I 6 ALBERTA                      AL 
      Data Values:  024 00000 C 00000 C 00000 C 00000 C 00000 C 00000 C -0002 I -0002 I -0002 I -0002 I -0002 I -0002 I -0002 I -0002 I 00000 C 00000 C 00000 C 00000 C 0000 0 C 00000 C 00000 C 00000 C 00000 C 00000 C 
      Flagged Periods: 1996040107D1996040114

The first line provides station information, the second line provides the data values, with codes indicating incomplete data (and negative data values indicating the kind of incomplete data: missing or accumulating), and the third line indicates the start and end dates of any missing periods.

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