•    About Us   
•    Data   
•    Products   
•    GLOSS   
•    Training   
•    Links   

Changes to the PSMSL Data Distribution

As part of the PSMSL website and database redesign, the data file formats and conventions have changed. Unfortunately, this will impact our users. However, we hope that after an initial adjustment period you will find these changes beneficial. The purpose of this news article is to outline the major changes to the data distribution.

The first and most significant change is the unique station ID assigned to each tide gauge station. Within the PSMSL, this station ID will replace the coastline/station codes as the primary identifier. (The coastline code was previously referred to as the country code.) The coastline/station codes have been retained for backwards compatibility. The one exception is Antarctica, which has changed from 'A ' to '999'. Note that most of the web pages will use the station ID as the basis for the web page names.

With the changes to the database, minor changes to the psmsl.dat and rlrann.dat files were not possible. As these files also did not lend themselves to easy analysis, we no longer distribute them. The complete data sets can now be downloaded in zip files. These contain a filelist, a Matlab script to read in the data, and data and documentation files. The formats for these files are detailed in the complete data set page, the PSMSL help file, and the data notes page.

Notable changes to the data files include:

• The files are now semi-colon delimited.
• Missing data points are now padded with an extreme value (-99999 for mean sea level).
• The overall quality control flag and the missing days flag in the annual average files are now either "N" or "Y".
• The 'flag for attention' has changed to either '000' or '001'. In the future, we may add additional quality control flags.

Please let psmsl@noc.ac.uk know if there are any unexpected issues.