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	Department of Oceanography University of Hawaii



Meteorological observations are collected during HOT cruises by the science personnel and stored in ASCII files. Two data formats exist. Cruises 1 through 27 are written in the first format that contains only numeric data (files met1_#.dat, where # is the cruise number). Starting with cruise 28, the data exist in the original format and in the second format that contains some character fields (e.g. Type of cloud) in addition to the numerical data (files met2_#.dat).



met1_#.dat format

The following explains the data columns. For more information please refer to the International Ship Weather Code specifications.

    Columns    Contents
    -------    --------
      1        Year
      2        Month
      3        Day
      4        Hour of the day (GMT)
     5-6       Latitude position (degrees and minutes)
     7-8       Longitude position (degrees and minutes)
     9-10      Ship speed (knots) and direction
    11-12      Relative wind speed (knots) and direction
      13       Atmospheric Pressure (mbar or Inches of Mercury)                 
      14       Dry Bulb Air Temperature (deg C)
      15       Wet Bulb Air Temperature (deg C)
      16       Sea Surface Temperature (deg C)
      17       Quality word

The quality word is the left-to-right concatenation of required quality bytes for the variables measured starting with column 9. They are defined as follows:

 byte value  Definition
     2       Acceptable measurement.
     3       Questionable measurement.
     4       Bad measurement.
     5       Not reported.
     6       Interpolated value.
     7       Not assigned for meteorological data
     8       Not assigned for meteorological data
     9       Not sampled



met2_#.dat format

The Hawaiian Ocean Time series experiment (HOT) Meteorological observation data from cruises 28 on are stored in ASCII files met2_**.dat (** cruise number). The following explains the data columns. For more information please refer to the Marine Surface Weather Observations. National Weather Service Observing Handbook No. 1.

    Columns    Contents
    -------    --------
      1        Year
      2        Month
      3        Day
      4        Hour of the day (GMT)
     5-6       Latitude position (degrees and minutes)
     7-8       Longitude position (degrees and minutes)
     9-10      Ship speed (knots) and direction
    11-12      Relative wind speed (knots) and direction
    13-14      True wind speed (knots) and direction
      15       Atmospheric Pressure (mbar)                 
      16       Dry Bulb Air Temperature (deg C)
      17       Wet Bulb Air Temperature (deg C)
      18       Sea Surface Temperature (deg C)
      19       Type of cloud (Low, Medium, High)
      20       Amount of Cloud (1/8th)
      21       Present Weather Code



Download Met data (via FTP)

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. OCE 9303094, 9811921, 0117919, and 0327513. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.