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Complete PSMSL Data Set

Before using any of these PSMSL data files, please appreciate the differences between 'Metric' and 'RLR' data values. See the RLR definition page for more information.

The complete time series for all of the stations in the database can be found in zipped files containing the RLR monthly mean data and RLR annual mean data. (The Metric monthly mean data is also available, but please realise this data should only be used in special circumstances.) See the notes page for details on the formats. The text files catalogue.dat and nucat.dat contain a complete listing of the data sets, and their format is described in the psmsl.hel file, which has a large amount of additional information.

These zip files contain filelist.txt, extracted_from_database, a Matlab script to read all the data, and two directories: docu and data. filelist.txt is a semi-colon delimited file. It contains the station ID, latitude, longitude, station name, coastline code, station code, and a quality-control flag (qcflag). If the qcflag is "Y", please read the documentation file. The Fortran fixed format is i5,2x,f10.6,2x,f11.6,2x,a40,2x,i3,2x,i3,2x,a1. extracted_from_database is a file that contains the date (shown in the sidebar on the left) of the creation of the files included in this distribution. The documentation for the Matlab scripts is included in the scripts.

Previously, the PSMSL had distributed the entire database in a compact format. However, these formats are no longer adequate to represent the database. For reference, we have created an archive of these formats as of their last update.