Introduction
About the Multisensor (NEXRAD and gauge) Data
Known data problems
Elk River Basin, January 4, 1998
Data
Use the data from the following files for all simulations. These files were obtained directly from ABRFC. Some of the data files
are improved over those available for DMIP 1 so returning DMIP 1 participants should replace the files they used in DMIP 1 with
these files for any overlapping period. Each tar file contains three months worth of hourly data files. The individual hourly
files are compressed using the UNIX compress utility. For example, to extract files for January, February, and March of 1996, you
could use the command: 'tar -xvf 1996_1.tar' and then uncompress the files with the command 'uncompress -v *'. Each resulting
hourly file covers the entire ABRFC forecast area. The file names (xmrgDDMMYYYHHz) indicate the ending time of the data. For
example, a file named 'xmrg0829200419z' contains hourly precipitation totals for August 29, 2004 from 18 GMT to 19 GMT. File
format specifics and example codes to read the file are provided below.
For the earlier years, some of the precipitation grid files may have been
created on HP Unix systems. In more recent years, the RFCs have switched to
generating these grids on computers with a different type of chip that run the
Linux operating system. This affects the way in which binary files are written;
however, the programs we provide (see link below) can automatically account for
this when reading these files.
Information on how to read and georeference xmrg files.
www.nws.noaa.gov 
