Daily Files (binary format)

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Daily files are in binary format and contain daily values of the climate variable indicated by the filename.

The scaling factor is the factor by which the data were multiplied before storage. To return the values to the correct units (described in the file header) divide the values in the files by the scaling factor.

For example, temperature is given in units of degrees C and has a scaling factor of 10. This means that a listed value of 56 is actually 5.6 C (56/10 = 5.6).

o User's Guide

o VARIABLES

o FSR
Daily fraction of potential solar radiation at top of atmosphere [0-1]
Scaled by: 1000
o FSR_SFC
Daily fraction of potential solar radiation at surface [0-1]
Scaled by: 1000
o IRR
Mean daily solar irradiance [W/m**2]
Scaled by: 100
o P
Precipitation [mm]
Scaled by: 10
o PSR_SFC
Potential total solar radiation at top of atmosphere [kJ/m2]
Scaled by: 1.0
o PSR_SFC
Potential total solar radiation at surface [kJ/m2]
Scaled by: 1.0
o RH
New Mean daylight relative humidity [%]
Scaled by: 10
o SR
Total incident solar radiation [kJ/m**2]
Scaled by: 1
o TN
Minimum temperature [C]
Scaled by: 10
o TX
Maximum temperature [C]
Scaled by: 10
o VP
New Vapor pressure [mb]
Scaled by: 100

o FILES AVAILABLE

The daily files are in binary format and have been compressed using the GNU software utility, gzip.

o Fortran program to extract data from binary files:

biread.f

To extract data from a file you are interested in you will need to modify the biread.f program slightly. The variables 'fin' and 'fout' (biread,f lines 89 and 90) currently contain filenames which should be replaced to correspond to the file you wish to look at. You must also indicate which grid cell you wish to extract (biread.f, line 63). Note that since background cells are not stored in the daily files, the grid cell value will not equal the file position of the desired record. 

                           Size (kBytes)
Filename          Compressed       Decompressed

README.vem                         2
fsr.BI.gz           921       4826
fsr_sfc.BI.gz       903       4826
irr.BI.gz          2919       4826
p.BI.gz             830       4826
psr_sfc.BI.gz      2238       4826
psr_toa.BI.gz        83       4826
rh.BI.gz           1737       4826
sr.BI.gz           2806       4826
tn.BI.gz           1854       4826
tx.BI.gz           1887       4826
vp.BI.gz           2267       4826

Note:

We also provide decompressed versions of the individual daily files on the NCAR anonymous FTP site . Transfer of decompressed daily files will take considerably more time than compressed versions, and is not recommended unless users are unable to use GNU gzip on their systems.

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