National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration |Coastal Services Center

Water Quality Data Format


The accompanying data file, cruzdata.txt (423KB), consists of space delimited, formatted fields of water quality data collected in cruises from 1992 to 1994. In its present form, the data can be imported into most database programs such as Excel, or it can be read with a script using the following FORTRAN-style format:
format(a9,a6,f11.4,f12.4,a14,a12,f11.4,f8.4,f12.4,f8.4,f10.4,f10.4,f8.4,f10.4)
Accompanying this data is a short FORTRAN program entitled readdata.f (2KB) which will read the data for you. It has been compiled (f77) for UNIX (SGI) into a file called readdata. Metadata for cruises can be found in the Metadata directory.
Field Name Full Name Description
Date Date and Time (24 hour) Local time of day mm/dd/yy hh:mm
Latitude Decimal Degrees N or S Decimal format, N=Positive, S=Negative
Longitude Decimal Degrees E or W Decimal format, E=Positive, W=Negative
StationID Station ID Code Number/letter combination (sometimes arbitrary)
Source Cruise/Source Code Cruise names. See cruises on-line for a complete list
Depth Sample Depth Depth in meters
Temp Temperature Degrees Celcius
Salin Salinity Parts per Thousand
pH pH pH units
PAR Photosynthetically Active Radiation mmol photons/m2/sec (400-700 nm)
Secchi Secchi Depth Depth in meters
TSS Total Suspended Solids mg/L
Chlor Chlorophyll a mg/L
NOAA Coastal Services Center
 E-mail comments to csc@csc.noaa.gov.