Most recent update: April 14, 2005


Joint Archive for Sea Level:   Research Quality Data Set
===============================================================

    The Joint Archive for Sea Level (JASL), a collaboration between 
the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center (UHSLC) and the 
World Data Center-A for Oceanography, the National Oceanographic
Data Center (NODC), and the National Coastal Data Development Center 
(NCDDC), continues to acquire, quality control, manage, and distribute 
sea level data as initiated by the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere 
(TOGA) Program, which ended in 1994.  The TOGA ocean monitoring 
networks were primarily in the tropics.  Since the end of TOGA, the 
JASL has slowly begun to absorb sea level sites in oceanographically
strategic locations beyond the tropics.  The JASL is now
an official Global Sea Level Observing System (GLOSS)
data center.  The JASL Research Quality Data Set (RQDS) is 
the largest global collection of quality-controlled hourly sea level.  
Efforts are underway to acquire new sites and uncover 
historic records as available.

    The JASL receives hourly data from regional and national 
sea level networks.  The data are inspected and obvious
errors such as data spikes and time shifts are corrected.  
Gaps less than 25 hours are interpolated. Reference level 
problems are referred back to the originator.  If the
originators can not resolve the reference level shift,
comparisons with neighboring sites or examination of the
hourly residuals may warrant an adjustment.  Descriptive 
station information and quality assessments are prepared.  
The objective is to assemble a scientifically valid, 
well-documented archive of hourly, daily, and monthly 
sea level values in standardized formats.  These 
data are annually submitted to the World Data Center-A for 
Oceanography (WDCA) and the monthly values are provided to 
the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level.  

   For some monthly data series, discrepancies may exist 
between the PSMSL and the RQDS holdings.  The most obvious
reasons are as follows.  1) Quality control is performed at
the hourly level at the JASL. 2) The filtering methods
for obtaining daily values from the hourly values, then
monthly data from the daily data, differ.  3) The originators
may have provided a different version of the data set to
each archive center.

     This account contains the most recent holdings of the 
UHSLC for series that have been quality controlled, assessed, 
and documented.  As of April 14, 2005 the holdings 
consisted of 535 series with 10,461 station-years of quality-
assured data. The series are of variable lengths with the 
greatest concentration between 5 and 30 years, although a few 
sites have over 70 years.

     The hourly data consist of files grouped by year that
have been "zipped" into a single file per time series.
The Info-Zip web site is at: http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip
and the software can be directly downloaded from
ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/infozip.  This freeware zip 
utility is compatible to most platforms and operating
systems.  For MS-DOS systems, use the -aa option
during unzipping.  This will add the Carriage Return-
Line Feed end-of-record sequence.

     If you have any troubles, please let us know
and we will satisfy your request using a different format.
We do provide software for format conversion (see
subdirectory /software/convert).

     A data report (November 2000) is available upon request or 
online at http://ilikai.soest.hawaii.edu/UHSLC/jaslanrep.html.
A data report is planned for later this year.  
report will be produced in August 2005.  The updated data
as of April 2005 are summarized at:
http://ilikai.soest.hawaii.edu/UHSLC/jaslst05.html

                           
             oOOOOOO          Mr. Patrick Caldwell
          /oOO    OO|         Joint Archive for Sea Level
        oOO/                  Dept. of Oceanography
      /OOO                    University of Hawaii
    /oOOO.O|       _O___      1000 Pope Road, MSB 317
    oOOOOO.Oo     /           Honolulu, Hawaii 96822 USA
  /oOOOOOOOO..o     |       caldwell@hawaii.edu
 ooOOOOOOOOOOO.. ___|_\___  fax: 808-956-2352 or 808-956-4104
 oOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO / OOOooooooo.. office phone: 808-956-4105
 OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo.....
 OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooo.......
    See our web site at http://uhslc.soest.hawaii.edu/jasl.html



The organization of this dataset is a mirror image of what is available
from the anonymous FTP area (except for the /misc directory).

To acquire these data via FTP

            ftp ilikai.soest.hawaii.edu

     or

            ftp 128.171.154.59

      user: anonymous
  password: <please enter your email address>

            cd rqds

Organization and File Names
===========================
The series have been organized into subdirectories by ocean.
Within each "ocean" subdirectory, the daily and monthly values
are placed in separate directories, along with a directory for
documentation of each series.

All ASCII files have DOS end-of-line characters (CR-LF).
 
DIRECTORY TREE

Below, all names beginning with a backslash "/" are directories.
 
    /                           "primary directory"
      .
      .
      README.txt               "file describing organization of the
      .                         account and convention for file names.
      .
      PROCESS.05               "stations worked on in 2004-5 (new, updated,
                                deleted, or replaced)"
      .
      .
      REPLACE.05               "stations with site-years previously
                                existing in the RQDS that have recently
                                been replaced with corrections or 
                                adjustments"
      .
      .
      inventry.lst             "list of site_id, lat, lon, ocean,
      .                         and time-span"
      .
      .
      hourly.fmt               "format description hourly"
      daily.fmt                "format description daily"
      monthly.fmt              "format description monthly"
      hour2daily.txt           "describes filter hourly->daily"
      policy.dmt               "comments on processing and the
                                station documentation file"
      .
      .
      /misc
          contributors.txt     "list of contributors"
          2003.txt             "series with 2003 data"
          2004.txt             "series with 2004 data"
          backward.txt         "series extended backwards"
          new.txt              "new series"
          updated.txt          "updated series"
                               *the last three are relative to Nov2003
      .
      .
      /pacific                 "subdirectory for sites in Pacific"
        .
        .
         pacific.lst           "inventory of Pacific Ocean sites"
        .
        .
        /daily                 "subdirectory for daily  values"
        /monthly               "subdirectory for monthly values"
        /hourly                "subdirectory for hourly values"
        /doc                   "information on station specifications,"
        .                      "data record span, and quality"
        .
        
      /indian                  "subdirectory for sites in Indian Ocean"
         indian.lst            "inventory of Indian Ocean sites"
        . 
        .                      "similar subdirectories as Pacific"
        .
      /atlantic                "subdirectory for sites in Atlantic    "
         atlantic.lst          "inventory of Atlantic Ocean sites"
        .
        .                      "similar subdirectories as Pacific"

DATA FORMAT:

    The JASL archiving formats are used and are explained in
files "hourly.fmt", "daily.fmt" and "monthly.fmt" within the 
"rqds" subdirectory.  The data files consist of fixed-length, 
80-byte ASCII records.  Separate files contain general 
information regarding the installation and the final assessment 
of data quality for each series.


DATA FILE NAMING CONVENTION:

  data and documentation files :

     name                         contents
  ----------------     -----------------------------------------
 *hsssv.zip            hourly   data for site_id sss, series v
  dsssv.dat            daily    data for site_id sss, series v
  msssv.dat            monthly  data for site_id sss, series v
  qasssv.dmt           documentation for site_id sss, series v

*The hourly file is zipped.  See notes above regarding unzipping.
The unzipped file creates hourly data files grouped by year
with file naming convention, hsssvyy.dat, where yy is the year.

     The site_id is the Joint Archive for Sea Level (JASL)
convention, which can be seen in the inventory list (file
inventry.lst) that also includes country, latitude, longitude, 
ocean, time-span, and completeness index.  

     Some sites have more than one independent time segment, 
denoted by series v (a,b,c,etc.). The segments are independent 
because they are not linked to the same reference level.

     If you have any questions, please contact Mr. Caldwell. 

    This project is funded by the National Ocean Service of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with support
from the Joint Archive for Sea Level, which is a cooperative
effort between the US National Oceanographic Data Center and the
University of Hawaii Sea Level Center.  If these data are
used for publication, please acknowledge this arrangement.

