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SuomiNet Global Positioning System (GPS) Data


Information updated on Thu Jan 31 10:59:00 2008


General Data Description

SuomiNet (named to honor meteorological satellite pioneer Verner Suomi) is a network of GPS receivers to provide real-time atmospheric precipitable water vapor measurements and other geodetic and meteorological information. ARM has built geodetic monuments for Suominet GPS receivers across the SGP CART domain.

Data Stream Names

gec30suomigpsX1.c1
Contains data from SuomiNet and other GPS stations located *outside* the contiguous 48 United States, including Barrow, Alaska
sgp30suomigpsX1.c1
Contains data from within the contiguous 48 States, including 15 stations at selected Southern Great Plains (SGP) extended facilities (see SGP ACRF map)

Measurement Description

Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and antennas provided by the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC) have been deployed at the ARM Climate Research Facility (ACRF) Tropical Western Pacific (TWP) sites at Nauru, Manus Island, and Darwin. The data from these systems are being acquired and processed by the SuomiNet project (http://www.suominet.ucar.edu/index.html) to provide 30-minute values of precipitable water vapor and other quantities listed below.

Measurements are made every half-hour; files contain one day of data.

For each time period and station:

Temporal Coverage

Data files are available beginning 2001-06-07 for sgp and beginning 2003-02-12 for gec. The data are available at the ARM Archive a few days after they are generated.

Area Covered

sgp30suomigpsX1.c1
The sgp data stream includes all the suominet CONUS sites. See map of CONUS sites
EF Station IDs:
SGP-E1: Larned, KS (ID=SG12)
SGP-E3: LeRoy, KS (ID=SG15)
SGP-E5: Halstead, KS (ID=SG13)
SGP-E6: Towanda, KS (ID=SG14)
SGP-E7: Elk Falls, KS (ID=SG16)
SGP-E8: Coldwater, KS (ID=SG11)
SGP-E9: Ashton, KS (ID=SG04)
SGP-E11: Byron, OK (ID=SG10)
SGP-E12: Pawhuska, OK (ID=SG08)
SGP-E13: Lamont, OK (ID=SG01)
SGP-E15: Ringwood, OK (ID=SG09)
SGP-E19: El Reno, OK (ID=SG20)
SGP-E22: Cordell, OK (ID=SG19)
SGP-E24: Cyril, OK (ID=SG18)
SGP-E25: Seminole, OK (ID=SG17) REMOVED FROM SERVICE
SGP-E27: Earlsboro, OK (ID=) Replaced E25 at Seminole
gec30suomigpsX1.c1
The gec data stream includes all other global sites including those covering the NSA and TWP sites. See map of Global sites
ACRF site Station IDs:
SiteIDBegin Date
Darwin, AustraliaSA392004-12-01
Nauru Island, NauruSA402004-11-05
Manus Island, Papua New GuineaSA422004-12-03
Barrow, AlaskaSG272003-02-12?
Atqasuk, AlaskaATQK2007-07-15

Data Stream Inputs

Data files in netCDF are provided "as is" via Unidata's LDM (Local Data Manager) (see http://www.unavco.ucar.edu/project_support/suominet/UCARLDM.html)
The ARM files correspond to the daily post-processed solutions, originally named "suoPWV_YEAR.DOY.HH.00.1440". The daily files provide more accurate PWV retrievals than the hourly solutions intended for more rapid distribution of near real time data.

Notification Form Link

Notification form

Related Links

Suominet Web Page

Contacts

ARM Mentor

Richard Wagener

ARM Software Developer

Laurie Gregory

Data Source

Institution

Suominet Web Page

Processing History

This information is currently unavailable.

Reprocessing History

Reprocessing Date

This information is currently unavailable.

Start End Reprocessing

This information is currently unavailable.

Reason Reprocessing

This information is currently unavailable.

FAQ

Q: In the netCDF files sgpsuomigpsX1.c1.yyyymmdd.000000.cdf, each GPS station has an associated network ID, which apparently indicates which network (Suominet, FSL, DOT, ...) the station belongs to. However, for the files I downloaded, I find only missing values (99.) in this field.
A: Teresa Van Hove: I have another netCDF PWV product I generate where I combine data from different hourly solutions that I run. ARM is archiving the Suomi network solution and I'm not filling in the network field for it.
However there are a handful of sites that are operated by other agencies that I process along with the Suomi network. Some are IGS sites used to keep my reference frame current with the IGS reference frame the orbits are calculated in and others are from state agencies that use the same antenna as the Suomi network and have some kind of a met sensor (often ASOS) located near the GPS antenna.
If you want to be sure that you are only using Suomi sites you can select sites that are SA##, SC## or SG##. I.e. CASL, HILB, IUCO are all non-Suominet sites and are operated by agencies in SC, NC and IL.

Data User Notes

Computing Date and Time
There are three variables in these files to compute time.

The variable for each measurement is time_offset:long_Name = "Time delta from start_time"

In addition, there are two global variables in each file:
start_date="yyyy.DDD.00.00.00" where DDD = Julian Day and
start_time in seconds since 1980-01-06 00:00Z (the beginning of the GPS era) which is offset 315,964,800 seconds from 1970-01-01 00:00Z (std unix time).

The time for each measurement can be computed either using time_offset and start_date or time_offset and start_time.

An explanation of why these units are used can be found at: http://www.oc.nps.navy.mil/~jclynch/timsys.html

Sample Code for ACRF sites
This sample Fortran program demonstrates how to read the gec30suomigpsX1.c1 and sgp30suomigpsX1.c1 files to extract the data for the ACRF field sites.
Retrieval Process and Revision
Suominet data has been processed with the updated Bernese software. B5.0. Please click here for more information on the Suominet Bernese software update.

Example Data

This information is currently unavailable.

Quicklook Links

This information is currently unavailable.

Glossary

This information is currently unavailable.

Acronyms

CONUS	Continental United States
GPS	Global Positioning System
PWV	Precipitable Water Vapor
SGP	Southern Great Plains

Citable References

Bevis M., S. Businger, T.A. Herring, C. Rocken, R.A. Anthes and R.H. Ware, 1992. GPS Meteorology: Remote Sensing of Atmospheric Water Vapor Using the Global Positioning System, Journal of Geophys. Research, Vol. 97, No. D14, pp 787 - 801.

Ware Randolph H., David W. Fulker, Seth A. Stein, David N. Anderson, Susan K. Avery, Richard D. Clark, Kelvin K. Droegemeier, Joachim P. Kuettner, J. Bernard Minster,and Soroosh Sorooshian, 2000. SuomiNet: A Real-Time National GPS Network for Atmospheric Research and Education. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 81, No. 4, pp 677 - 694.