readme.txt
6/1/00

CRU05 1901-1996 0.5o Latitude/Longitude Monthly Climate Data
23 August 1998

LBA Ecology subset 
    minimum longitude -85W           maximum longitude -30W
    minimum latitude -25S            maximum latitude 10N

Variables                  Directory           Units
Precipitation              pre                 mm
Wet day frequency          rd0                 days
Mean temperature           tmp                 degC*10
Diurnal temperature range  dtr                 degC*10
Vapour pressure            vap                 hPa*10
Cloud cover                cld                 oktas*10


Format - ASCII Grid format (for ArcInfo)
         The first 5 rows include the header information and NODATA values
         are set to -9999.
Projection - Data is not projected/Geographic (lat/long)
Number of Columns - 110
Number of Rows - 70 
Cellsize - .5

Each variable directory (pre, rd0, tmp...) contains a directory for each year
represented by the data (1901d, 1902d...).  Each of these directories contains
12 zipped files representing months of the year (numbered 1-12).  Use gzip to
uncompress the files.  Use the ASCIIGRID command in ArcInfo or GRID to import 
the grids.
	
    ARC:  ASCIIGRID <in_ascii_file> <out_grid> {INT | FLOAT}
    GRID: <out_grid> = ASCIIGRID (<in_ascii_file>, {INT | FLOAT})

The original data was subsetted and reformatted into monthly grids clipped to 
the LBA Ecology region using perl script and Arc Macro Language (AML) 
programming.  Specifically, perl script was used to reformat the header 
information to the asciigrid file format and to parse the yearly data into
monthly grids.  AML was used to read the data into ArcInfo, to FLIP the grids,
to CLIP the global data to the LBA_ECOLOGY region, and to export the grids
to asciigrid format.