Table of Contents - The Atmospheric Studies Group at TRC

Section 6: SMERGE Surface Data Meteorological Preprocessor
characteristics of the output data file, and routine statistics. A sample output list file is shown in Table 6-
6, and a sample SURF.DAT output data file is shown in Table 6-7.
6.1
Generic Hourly Surface Data File
For hourly surface observational data that do not conform to any of the data sets above, a user can
develop a comma delimited generic data file that SMERGE is able to reformat into a surface data file for
direct use in CALMET. The data must be hourly and it must also be in the exact comma delimited format
in order for it to be processed by SMERGE. The comma delimited data is most easily created from a
spreadsheet such as Excel which can be used to process the raw data and align the data into the specific
columns required for this data processing option. Note that no blank data are allowed. All hours are
multiplied by 100 and missing data must be represented by 9999.00. In the event of no cloud
information, the value 999 means ‘clear skies’. The first three lines of text must not be altered other than
the ID number of the meteorological site, all other column headers and text should remain unchanged.
Only one generic observation file can be processed at a time. Once the file has been created in an Excel
spreadsheet or similar it must be saved as a comma delimited file. Note that no blank spaces are allowed
in-between the commas. A sample of this file as the final saved comma delimited version is detailed in
Table 6-1 below, Table 6-2 shows the same table in spreadsheet format. The data requirements per
column and units are clear from Table 6-2.
6-3