During the field phase of the experiment, the raw binary aircraft data was logged directly onto a PC hard disk within the data acquisition unit, and was offloaded onto 90Mb removable Bernoulli disks after each flight. The raw data has since been transferred onto rewritable Hewlett Packard optical disks (1024 bytes/sector), formatted as a UNIX filesystem. The total size of the raw binary data set is approximately 750Mb.
The final, processed data set (not yet available) will be in two parts: processed time series data and statistical data. The statistical data will be available as formatted ASCII labelled columnar data (eg. readable with FORTRAN free "*" format) and also as QUATTRO- PRO or LOTUS 1-2-3 spreadsheet files. The large size of the body of processed 20Hz time series data makes an ASCII format unrealistic. This data will be stored in unformat- ted (binary) files, sometimes called "stream" or "transparent-access" files. These should be readable by any computer operating system (including DOS), but will require that the byte sequencing be known, so that the user can write routines to read the data. Working routines to read the data from common DOS FORTRAN and UNIX C compilers are provided in Appendix A1. These are the same routines used in the FIAMS processing software package, "RAMF" (file type B1/D1 in DOS/UNIX "RAMF").
The estimated size of the entire processed data set (when available) will be approximately 600Mb. All data will be stored on optical disk at FIAMS, and will be available upon request via ftp or user-funded optical disk. The FIAMS ftp site resides on the machine earthsci.es.flinders.edu.au, and is semi-anonymous in that it will only allow access from "known" machines. The user must provide FIAMS with the name and IP number of their machine in order to be allowed access. This can be done via e-mail correspondence with either Jörg Hacker (mojmh@earthsci.es.flinders.edu.au) or Alastair Williams (moagw@earthsci.es.flinders.edu.au). The statistical data set, which will be much smaller than the time series data set, may also be made more widely available by transferral to a central TOGA COARE data archive site, if one becomes available.
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