PACS Land Precipitation Data from GTS

1.  General Description

    This data set contains all land-based precipitation 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 30 April 2003.  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 precipitation observations.  JOSS 
conducted no quality control on these data.

2.  Format Description

    An example line from a data file looks like this (the lines are over 80
characters so there is line wrapping):

 72203  511  26.68  80.12     6. 97  7  1    0 23.9  0.08 99.99 9

Where 72203  is the WMO Site Identifier 
      511    relates to which report within the Office Note format the data
               came from
      26.68  is the latitude (North positive)
      80.12  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)
      23.9   is the actual observation time (UTC)
      0.08   is the 6-hour precipitation accumulation (in)
      99.99  is the 24-hour precipitation accumulation (in)
      9      is the duration of precipitation (# of 6 hour periods)

For the 6 and 24 hour precipitation observations a value of 99.99 represents
a missing value and 99.98 represents a trace value.