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This routine is designed to convert the flux tower Level 4 data
from the AmeriFlux
network of observations from micrometeorological tower sites.
AmeriFlux is part of FLUXNET
and the converter is hoped to be a suitable starting point for the conversion
of observations from FLUXNET. As of May 2012, I have not yet tried to work with
any other observations from FLUXNET.
The AmeriFlux Level 4 products are recorded using the local time.
DART observation sequence files use GMT. For more information about
AmeriFlux data products, go to
http://ameriflux.lbl.gov.
There was a pretty severe bug in the converter that swapped latent heat flux and sensible heat flux. The bug was present through revision 7200. It has been corrected in all subsequent versions.
The workflow is usually:
For some models (CLM, for example), it is required to reorganize the observation sequence files into a series of files that contains ONLY the observations for each assimilation. This can be achieved with the makedaily.sh script.
This namelist is read from the file input.nml. Namelists start with an ampersand '&' and terminate with a slash '/'. Character strings that contain a '/' must be enclosed in quotes to prevent them from prematurely terminating the namelist.
&level4_to_obs_nml text_input_file = 'textdata.input', obs_out_file = 'obs_seq.out', year = -1, timezoneoffset = -1, latitude = -1.0, longitude = -1.0, elevation = -1.0, flux_height = -1.0, maxgoodqc = 3, verbose = .false. /
Contents | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
text_input_file | character(len=128) | Name of the Level 4 ASCII file of comma-separated values. This may be a relative or absolute filename. |
obs_out_file | character(len=128) | Name of the output observation sequence file. |
year | integer | The year of the observations in the Level 4 text file. |
timezoneoffset | real | the time zone offset (in hours) of the station. The tower observation times are local time, we need to convert them to GMT. |
latitude | real | Latitude (in degrees N) of the tower. |
longitude | real | Longitude (in degrees E) of the tower. For internal consistency, DART uses longitudes in the range [0,360]. An input value of -90 will be converted to 270, for example. |
elevation | real | surface elevation (in meters) of the tower. |
flux_height | real | height (in meters) of the flux instrument on the tower. |
maxgoodqc | real | maximum value of any observation quality control flag to pass through to the output observation sequence. Keep in mind that filter has the ability to discriminate on the value, so there is really little to be gained by rejecting them during the conversion. |
verbose | logical | Print extra information during the level4_to_obs execution. |
The data was acquired from
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ameriflux/data/Level4/Sites_ByName
and have names like
USBar2004_L4_h.txt,
USHa12004_L4_h.txt,
USNR12004_L4_h.txt,
USSP32004_L4_h.txt,
USSRM2004_L4_h.txt,
USWCr2004_L4_h.txt,
USWrc2004_L4_h.txt, ...
The Level 4 products in question are ASCII files of comma-separated values taken
every 30 minutes for an entire year. The first line is a comma-separated list of
column descriptors, all subsequent lines are comma-separated numerical values.
The converter presently searches for the columns pertaining to NEE_or_fMDS,
H_f, LE_f, their corresponding quality control fields,
and those columns pertaining to the time of the observation.
These values are mapped as follows:
Level 4 units | Level 4 variable | description | DART type | DART kind | DART units |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
W/m^2 | LE_f | Latent Heat Flux | TOWER_LATENT_HEAT_FLUX | QTY_LATENT_HEAT_FLUX | W/m^2 |
[0-3] | LE_fqc | QC for LE_f | N/A | N/A | same |
W/m^2 | H_f | Sensible Heat Flux | TOWER_SENSIBLE_HEAT_FLUX | QTY_SENSIBLE_HEAT_FLUX | W/m^2 |
[0-3] | H_fqc | QC for H_f | N/A | N/A | same |
umolCO2/m^2/s | NEE_or_fMDS | Net Ecosystem Production | TOWER_NETC_ECO_EXCHANGE | QTY_NET_CARBON_PRODUCTION | gC/m^2/s |
[0-3] | NEE_or_fMDSqc | QC for NEE_or_fMDS | N/A | N/A | same |
The LE_fqc, H_fqc, and NEE_or_fMDSqc variables use the following convention:
0 = original, 1 = category A (most reliable), 2 = category B (medium), 3 = category C (least reliable). (Refer to Reichstein et al. 2005 Global Change Biology for more information)
I am repeating the AmeriFlux Data Fair-Use Policy because I believe it is important to be a good scientific citizen:
"The AmeriFlux data provided on this site are freely available and were furnished by individual AmeriFlux scientists who encourage their use.
Please kindly inform in writing (or e-mail) the appropriate AmeriFlux scientist(s) of how you intend to use the data and of any publication plans. It is also important to contact the AmeriFlux investigator to assure you are downloading the latest revision of the data and to prevent potential misuse or misinterpretation of the data.
Please acknowledge the data source as a citation or in the acknowledgments if no citation is available. If the AmeriFlux Principal Investigators (PIs) feel that they should be acknowledged or offered participation as authors, they will let you know and we assume that an agreement on such matters will be reached before publishing and/or use of the data for publication.
If your work directly competes with the PI's analysis they may ask that they have the opportunity to submit a manuscript before you submit one that uses unpublished data. In addition, when publishing please acknowledge the agency that supported the research.
Lastly, we kindly request that those publishing papers using AmeriFlux data provide reprints to the PIs providing the data and to the AmeriFlux archive via ameriflux.lbl.gov."
The level4_to_obs.f90 file is the source for the main converter program. Look at the source code where it reads the example data file. You will almost certainly need to change the "read" statement to match your data format. The example code reads each text line into a character buffer and then reads from that buffer to parse up the data items.
To compile and test, go into the work subdirectory and run the quickbuild.csh script to build the converter and a couple of general purpose utilities. advance_time helps with calendar and time computations, and the obs_sequence_tool manipulates DART observation files once they have been created.
To change the observation types, look in the DART/obs_def directory. If you can find an obs_def_XXX_mod.f90 file with an appropriate set of observation types, change the 'use' lines in the converter source to include those types. Then add that filename in the input.nml namelist file to the &preprocess_nml namelist, the 'input_files' variable. Multiple files can be listed. Then run quickbuild.csh again. It remakes the table of supported observation types before trying to recompile the source code.
An example script for converting batches of files is in the shell_scripts directory. A tiny example data file is in the data directory. These are NOT intended to be turnkey scripts; they will certainly need to be customized for your use. There are comments at the top of the script saying what options they include, and should be commented enough to indicate where changes will be likely to need to be made.
See the discussion in the observations introduction page about what options are available for the things you need to specify. These include setting a time, specifying an expected error, setting a location, and an observation type.
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DART software - Copyright UCAR. This open source software is provided by UCAR, "as is", without charge, subject to all terms of use at http://www.image.ucar.edu/DAReS/DART/DART_download
Contact: | Tim Hoar |
Revision: | $Revision$ |
Source: | $URL$ |
Change Date: | $Date$ |
Change history: | try "svn log" or "svn diff" |