PACS Land Meteorological Data from GTS 1. General Description This data set contains all land-based surface data available from the Global Telecommunication System (GTS) over the region from 30 N to 30 S latitude and 60 to 180 W longitude as collected by NCAR/SCD for the period starting 1 July 1997 through 31 October 2001. The data came to UCAR/JOSS in NCEP Office Note format. JOSS converted the data to a columnar ASCII format (see Section 2) and extracted the meteorological observations. JOSS conducted no quality control on these data. NOTE: Starting in February 2001 the winds at many stations included in this dataset are incorrect. The BUFR encoding software at NCEP is not picking up a wind speed units indicator correctly. It appears the problem is with WMO stations data only - call sign station data are coming through the encoding correctly. NCEP has verified the problem and is looking into it now. 2. Format Description An example line from a data file looks like this (the lines are over 80 characters so there is line wrapping): 72201 511 24.55 81.75 6. 97 7 1 0 2.9 360. 4. 1017.7 1017.2 28.3 5.0 Where 72201 is the WMO Site Identifier 511 relates to which report within the Office Note format the data came from 24.55 is the latitude (North positive) 81.75 is the longitude (West positive) 6. is the station elevation (m) 97 is the year (97 = 1997) 7 is the month (7 = July) 1 is the day 0 is the nominal hour (UTC) 2.9 is the actual observation time (UTC) 360. is the wind direction (Deg) 4. is the wind speed (kts) 1017.7 is the sea level pressure (mb) 1017.2 is the station pressure (mb) 28.3 is the air temperature (Deg C) 5.0 is the dew point depression (Deg C)