Vaisala IRIS, User Manual

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• CATCH and RAINN products
The RAIN1 product serves as the basis for the RAINN and CATCH products.
You can also run WARN products can be run on the RAIN1 . Thus all subsequent
products that rely on RAIN1 for input benefit from the correction algorithm.
E.3 Gage Data File Format
The raingage data files should be sent automatically to a directory specified in IRIS Setup >
Input for the input pipe.
The data can be sent by FTP, RCP, or NFS. The file should contain the hourly gage totals for
all of the gages along with other supporting housekeeping information required by the
GAGE product such as date and time and raingage location.
The input data file format is as follows:
• Each file is plain text ASCII, and the overall structure is a collection fields consisting of a
keyword followed by one or more data values. This makes the format expandable, since
new keywords can easily be added in the future, and each software reader can choose
which set of keywords it needs to process.
• White space is used to separate the keywords and data values. Quotation marks may
be used around a string value if there is a possibility that the string contains white
space. Each line is terminated by a "newline" character.
• Each file represents data from any number of stations, but only one data time is
reported in each file. That time is the ending time of the data, and is reported using the
TIME and SPAN keywords in the first lines of the file. The fundamental time resolution
is quantized to one-minute intervals.
• Each rain gage station report consists of a line containing at least the CODE and
LONLAT
keywords, plus either the
RRATE
or
RFALL
keyword. The
QUAL
and
REM
keywords are optional.
In general, the input pipe must be custom, written either by the customer or by Vaisala. This
is the format used by the
AsciiToGage input pipe. If you wish to use another format, you
must write your own custom input pipe.
This recommended input gage data format does not match the format of the GAGE
product since the input pipe reformats the product for IRIS.
The basic information must be in the file, or in some cases, in a separate configuration file
for the input pipe. See
IRIS Programming Guide .
The keywords are as follows:
# any comment
Any line beginning with at "#" is ignored, as well as all blank lines.
TIME yyyymmddhhmm
The ending time for all of the stations reported in this file. The string of digits gives the
year, month, day, hour, and minute. This keyword appears once at the beginning of the
file.
IRIS Product and Display User Guide M211319EN-H
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