Data Management Info

For any questions regarding data formats or access, contact the TropChem data manager, Ken Aikin.

Submitting Data

The preferred method of submitting data to the data manager is to use the Chemical Sciences Division's FTP site. If possible please submit files in the icartt format (more info below). For information on this account, please contact Ken Aikin.

Data Access

Preliminary and final data files as well as other information related to the Chemical Sciences Division's activities on the NOAA P3 aircraft will be posted to this site as soon as it is available. Access is restricted to participants in the ARCPAC/IPY study unless otherwise noted.

File Format

Data files will be available in a text format used during the 2004 ICARTT Study. This format is a derivation of the 'NASA Ames' text format. The complete documentation for the ICARTT format can be found at a web site hosted by NASA; some general descriptions follow. A free Windows-based application called FScanBrowser was developed by Ali Aknan at NASA to assist investigators in checking for file format compliance. He has also developed a web-based tool to check ICARTT file formats. For users of the Igor software program, the following software tools are also available (files are zipped): 2008GeneralMacros.ipf, 2008GeneralMacrosHelp.ihf, 2008IcarttFormat.ipf on the document download page.

Data file names will be of the form dataID_locationID_YYYYMMDD_R#[_comments].ict where dataID indicates the type of measurement, locationID is NP3 (the NOAA P3); YYYYMMDD indicates date of the beginning of the measurement (or when the flight began); R# indicates a revision number. For final data, the character following the R is a number starting with 0. For preliminary data, that character should be a letter, starting with A. Lastly, the optional [_comments] indicates any special merging.

Time values are reported in UTC as seconds after midnight from the date given in the file name. The date in the file name is duplicated in the file header; in many files it appears at the beginning of the 7th line in yyyy mm dd format. The name of the time data column used for most of the fast response NOAA P3 measurements is "AOCTimewave". (AOC is an acronym for Aircraft Operations Center, the NOAA facility responsible for the NOAA P3 aircraft.)

Many investigators use a software program called Igor for data analysis. While the text-based ICARTT format is the data exchange format, all data files will also be available in Igor Binary format.