THE NERC MST RADAR FACILITY AT ABERYSTWYTH
- All data (from a given instrument or for a given data type) for a 24 hour period (00:00:00 - 23:59:59 UTC) should be stored in a single file
- the following file naming convention should be adopted so that the contents of the file can be appreciated without having to read it:
where:
 |
instrument-name | |
is the name of the instrument. In order to remove ambiguities for field campaigns where several groups are recording the same data type at the same location, the instrument name should be prefixed with an institute name. The prefix "nerc-mstrf-" has only been added to the most recent data types for the NERC MST Radar Facility. It will gradually be added to all file types - click here for more details. |
| instrument-location | is name of the place where the instrument was located (not of the organisation which made the observations). This is either capel-dewi or frongoch for data from the NERC MST Radar Facility. | ||
| YYYY | is the 4-digit year during which the data were collected | ||
| MM | is the 2-digit month [01 - 12] during which the data were collected | ||
| DD | is the 2-digit day [01 - 31] during which the data were collected | ||
| hh | is a 2-digit hour [00 - 23] during which the data were collected | ||
| mm | is a 2-digit minute [00 - 59] during which the data were collected | ||
| ss | is a 2-digit second [00 - 59] during which the data were collected | ||
| extra | contains any additional important information | ||
| ext | indicates the file format. This is typically na for Nasa Ames files or nc for netCDF files. |
The fields shown in square brackets are optional. The BADC maintains a list of accepted instrument and location names.
All of the files generated by the NERC MST Radar Facility since around 2005 have followed the above naming convention (albeit without the use of an institution name in the instrument name field). A number of legacy files exist which follow a similar, but more restricted, file naming convention:
|
prefix | |
is a 2 or 3 (lower-case) character file type indentifier |
| YY | is the 2-digit year [00 - 99] during which the observations were made |
The file name extensions are typically one of the following:
|
dat | |
indicating a (non-standard) binary format |
| gz | indicating a (non-standard) ASCII format which has been compressed (see below) | ||
| tgz | indicates a number of consecutive (non-standard) ASCII format files which have been archived into a single file before being compressed (see below). |
Dealing with .gz and .tgz extension files
These binary files have been compressed using the GNU gzip function. On a Linux/Unix system they can be uncompressed with the command:
gunzip filename.tgz
In the case of the .gz extension files, this gives an ASCII file with the name filename, which has no extension. In the case of the .tgz extension files, this gives an archive file (which contains a number of separate files) with the name filename.tar. The individual (ASCII) files are retrieved with the command:
On a Windows machine, these functions can be achieved through a tool such as WinZip. NOTE, however, that this gives rise to an unexpected change in file name in the case of the unaveraged wind files.