NODC Monthly Sailnity Climatology data Set 1. Data File Name NODC_SAL_1DEG_MON.lnx.CLIM 2. Contents analyses of monthly oceanic salinity of Levitus (1994) Provided by Tim Boyer of NOAA/NODC 3. File structure The data file is a direct access binary data file. The data is arranged in the order of month, starting from January. The data for each month is composed of 24 global fields, representing monthly climatology (psu) for salinity at the following depths(m): 0 -10 -20 -30 -50 -75 -100 -125 -150 -200 -250 -300 -400 -500 -600 -700 -800 -900 -1000 -1100 -1200 -1300 -1400 -1500 Each globe field is an array of 360 elemets in east-west direction and 180 lines in south and north direction. The global array starts from the 1deg lat/lon grid box at the south-west corner centering at (0.5deg E; 89.5deg S). The global array goes first from west to east, so that the second element in the array is the data at the grid box centering at (1.5deg E; 89.5deg S). Once covering all 360 elements in the south-most line, the array continues into the second line, so that the 361st element in the array is the data for the grid box centering at (0.5deg E, 88.5deg S) Each data is a 4-byte floadting number written in little endian byte order (the byte order used by all linux based work station). YOU NEED TO SWAP THE BYTE ORDER TO BIG ENDIAN IF YOU ARE WORKING WITH A SUPER COMPUTER. Missing code is -999.0. The size of the data file is therefore 4 byte (each number ) x 360 (elements in E-W direction) x 180 (lines in S-N direction) x 24 (fields, anomaly and error) x 12 (months) = 74649600 bytes 4. Sample fortran program to read the data file program : read-clim.lnx.f objective : to test read the NODC salinity climatology at surface level c parameter ( nx = 360, ny = 180, nmonth = 12 ) c dimension clim (nx,ny) c c 1. to open the data file c open (unit=10, # file='NODC_SAL_1DEG_MON.lnx.CLIM', # access='direct', recl=nx*ny*4) c c 2. to read the data c do 2001 kmm = 1, nmonth kinp = (kmm-1)*24 + 1 read (10,rec=kinp) clim write (6,*) 'finished reading data :', kmm, clim (180,90) 2001 continue c c stop end