SURFACE OBSERVATIONS CLOUD CLIMATOLOGY (SOBS)

This is a 2.5 degree Equal Area grid, and is the grid on which the data is produced. The SOBS equal-area grid contains 7290 grid boxes. 0 degrees latitude, 0 degrees longitude is a box corner. Boxes are numbered sequentially, beginning at the North Pole and the Greenwich Meridian, and proceeding eastward through the latitude zone, then southward to the next latitude zone.

This is a 2.5 degree Square latitude/longitude grid, and is used for display purposes. The grid is 144 x 72 (longitude x latitude) and has a total of 10368 boxes. 0 degrees latitude, 0 degrees longitude is a box corner. Longitude varies first, and begins at -180 degrees and proceeds eastward to +180 degrees. Latitude begins at -90 degrees and proceeds northward to +90 degrees.

Data is written using the IEEE standard for floating-point representation.

Data is written as scaled integers. Scale factors used are:

• Land Fraction Area: 10
• Amount: 10
• Number of Observations: 1
• Phase of First Harmonic: 100
• Absolute Amplitude of Harmonic: 10
• Percent Variance by First Harmonic: 10
• Number of Synoptic Hours or Months: 100
• Average Number of Synoptic Hours or Months: 10
• Number of Years Contributing to Trends: 100
• Span of Years Contributing to Trends: 100
• Interannual Variation: 10
• Trend (change average/year): 10
• Uncertainty of Trend: 10

Data is written 80 characters per record. Each record contains values for 8 grid boxes, each with a field width of 10 characters. The precision is 3 decimal places.

• EQ grid, IEEE floating point: 29160 bytes
• EQ grid, Scaled integer: 29160 bytes
• EQ grid, ASCII text: 72900 bytes
• SQ grid, IEEE floating point: 41472 bytes
• SQ grid, Scaled integer: 41472 bytes
• SQ grid, ASCII text: 103680 bytes