We discovered that there were a number of small errors, and a few large errors, in the .par files in the WEPP distribution (Scheele and Hall).
The steps used, and the data files required, to create a corrected .par file from a corrected version of the station's historical precipitation and temperature data (.dat) file (and incorporating corrections in the other weather data files) are presented here.
After you read these instructions, you may want to take dat2par for a spin.
Create a subdirectory dat2par on your hard disk. Use our dat2par.exe for MS-DOS, or compile dat2par.for into an executable file and place it and the Input Data Files listed below into the subdirectory. Subdirectory dat2par must have one subdirectory (i.e., ak ... wy) for each state, under which the wind data (*.par) files are placed.Only those .dat files to be turned into .par files need be in the dat2par directory; see step 1.
The files used in this procedure are:
PROGRAMS dat2par.for FORTRAN program based on Arlin Nicks' calparms.for 51 KB dat2par2.for dat2par.for with more comments and cleaned up a bit, but not the source code we compiled 49 KB dat2par.exe Executable version of dat2par.for variable PROCESS FILES list list of names of .dat files to process (one per line; case counts) variable INPUT DATA FILES *.dat precipitation and temperature data for your station 100 to 500 KB per station stations.dat list of station numbers, names, geolocations 424 KB statparm solar radiation, maximum half-hour precipitation depth, dew point data for triangulation 56 KB dewpoint dewpoint data for triangulation 23 KB timepeak.tot time to peak distributions data for triangulation 215 KB idxall names of wind files with latitude and longitude for triangulation 63 KB xx/*.par one directory per state (xx) full of wind .par files 6 KB per file OUTPUT DATA FILES output.file review for error messages and reports of unusual happenstances variable *.par CLIGEN v. 4.3 input parameter file 7 KB per station Click on the file name in the table to see the file, or check out the brief annotations.
Note: Most links in this document will open a new browser window. The new window may be hidden behind this one. If your operating system has been instructed to do something special with any of the file extensions here, your browser might try to launch an application to handle the file type, rather than display the file contents in the browser itself. For example, if you click on "stations.dat", Windows Notepad or Wordpad might be launched. Or worse, clicking on the "dat2par.for" link might launch your FORTRAN compiler.
The fundamental information needed to create a CLIGEN .par file for a station is a .dat file containing daily precipitation and maximum and minimum temperature data for the site. If there does not exist such a file, and one cannot be created, then one can not use this procedure to create a CLIGEN parameter file. (Technology does exist elsewhere to "adjust" a "nearby" station's .par file to represent another locality.)Find the corrected .dat files for the stations of interest and copy the files into the directory named dat2par.
Many .dat and .par files can be found behind the Stations in the United States (source: NWS) link in the Arlin Nicks Climate Database housed at the Agricultural Research Service's Hydrology Laboratory, Water Data Center. The .dat files are compressed as ZIP files. We have not done a complete comparison of those files compared to our updated files, so are unsure as to the quality of the data currently on that site.Ensure that the station of interest is listed in the stations.dat file. (You may also use this file to correlate station name and station number; the .dat files are named by their station number and have no station name stored internally.) If the station of interest is not listed in stations.dat, you will have to add a line representing it to stations.dat. You must determine the associated station name, geographic location (degrees and minutes of latitude and longitude), elevation in tens of feet, and a coded storm type.
We used the NOAA/NWS Cooperative Observer Network SODxx.html files from the Desert Research Institute's Western Regional Climate Center web site to determine the correspondence between station name and station number for stations not listed in stations.dat. For recognized stations, everything that file stations.dat needs, except for the storm type, can be found in the SOD files. (As of August 2000, the SOD files were available as "Old NCDC Cooperative Observer Network Inventory (1991)".)In the .dat file the first two columns represent the state ID number and the next four represent the station ID number. The state ID number will tell you which SOD file to look in. Connect the state ID number to a name by looking in stations.dat or timepeak.tot. There are often multiple entries under one station name for different periods of record in the SOD files.
The TYPE ("storm type" or "24-hour rainfall distribution type") values correspond to the four synthetic rainfall distributions described by the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Technical Release 55. Types 1 and 2 (I and IA) are for the Pacific maritime region with wet winters and dry summers. Type 4 (III) represents areas where large 24-hour rainfall amounts are brought on by tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast. Type 3 (II) covers the rest of the country.
Create or modify the file named list in the directory dat2par. Type (or dir /B/L *.dat >list or otherwise gather) the file names of all the .dat files to be used to generate the .par files, ensuring that the case used for the file extension .dat is lowercase or you may get an error message.
Open a command-line (MS-DOS) prompt window and navigate to the dat2par directory. At the prompt, typedat2parThe dat2par program generates large amounts of screen output about the data being used to create the parameter files. To create an output file instead of having the information scroll off the screen, the output can be redirected to a file by typingdat2par >output.file(Replace output.file with the desired name of your output file.) A new command line will appear when the process is completed.A .par file for each .dat file named in the list file will be created in the dat2par directory. Also, a file named triang.tmp (which you may delete) will be created for temporary storage of interpolation stations and weights.
Your new CLIGEN input parameter .par files can now be copied into the WEPP directory structure or used in some other manner. CLIGEN versions 4.2 and earlier actually use one mega-parameter file for each state. This file is a concatenation of the .par files created here.
These data files cover only the United States and a few nearby regions (Pacific Islands, Virgin Islands, etc.). The process should work for other regions, if the required weather data were amassed and put into the proper file formats. One potential problem exists in that in general the Northern hemisphere and the Western hemisphere are assumed. Not all files have space for a sign on latitude and longitude, and are treated inconsistently.
References
Scheele, D.l. and Hall, D.E. May 18, 2000. Corrections and Improvements to the CLIGEN Climate Database. USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Moscow, ID. 4 p.Agricultural Research Service. Stations in the United States (source: NWS). USDA Agricultural Research Service, Hydrology Laboratory, Water Data Center. FTP site at ftp://hydrolab.arsusda.gov/pub/nicks/states/
Agricultural Research Service. Arlin Nicks Climate Database. USDA Agricultural Research Service, Hydrology Laboratory, Water Data Center. Online at http://hydrolab.arsusda.gov/nicks/nicks.htm
Agricultural Research Service. Water Data Center. USDA Agricultural Research Service, Hydrology Laboratory. Online at http://hydrolab.arsusda.gov/wdc/arswater.html
Agricultural Research Service. Hydrology Laboratory. USDA Agricultural Research Service. Online at http://hydrolab.arsusda.gov/
Desert Research Institute. Online at http://www.dri.edu
Western Regional Climate Center. Desert Research Institute. Online at http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/inventory/
Desert Research Institute. Active Coop Station Data Inventory Listings Online at http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/inventory/inventact.html#ncdc2 [August 2000]
Natural Resources Conservation Service. 1986. Urban hydrology for small watersheds. Technical Release 55. Second edition (Appendix A revised January 1999). USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, Conservation Engineering Division. 164 p. Online at http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/water/quality/common/tr55/tr55.html [April 2000] (Local version has thumbnails added locally.)
Creating CLIGEN .par files from
.dat files and allies using
dat2par
David Hall and Dayna Scheele
September 2000
USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station
Moscow, Idaho, Forestry Sciences Laboratory
dat2par.html