FD ON-LINE DATA FORMATS AND
FILE NAMING CONVENTION

Data is available for downloading on either EQ or SQ grids, in either IEEE floating point, scaled integer, or ASCII text format.

This is a 2.5 degree Equal Area grid, and is the grid on which the data is produced. The ISCCP equal-area grid contains 6596 grid boxes; 0 degrees latitude, 0 degrees longitude is a box corner. Boxes are numbered sequentially, beginning at the South Pole and the Greenwich Meridian, and proceeding eastward through the latitude zone, then northward to the next latitude zone.

This is a 2.5 degree Square latitude/longitude grid, and is usually 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 factor used is: 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: 26384 bytes
• EQ grid, Scaled integer: 26384 bytes
• EQ grid, ASCII text: 65960 bytes
• SQ grid, IEEE floating point: 41472 bytes
• SQ grid, Scaled integer: 41472 bytes
• SQ grid, ASCII text: 103680 bytes

FILE NAMING CONVENTION

If you are downloading data from our ISCCP anonymous ftp site, note the following file naming conventions:

      NET FLUX                       FLUX
---------------------        -----------------------
FDAVGTTT__SSFFVVV.GRD        FDAVGTTT__SSFFVVVCC.GRD
FDYYYYMM__SSFFVVV.GRD        FDYYYYMM__SSFFVVVCC.GRD

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