How to create your own time series for use on the PSL composites web page

You can use your own monthly value timeseries in the composites web page. The file format is as follows (the old format with no years in the first line will no longer work). 

  iyearstart  iyearend
iyearstart  xm1 xm2 xm3 xm4 xm5 xm6 xm7 xm8 xm9 xm10 xm11 xm12
.
.
.
iyearend    xm1 xm2 xm3 xm4 xm5 xm6 xm7 xm8 xm9 xm10 xm11 xm12
xmiss

The first row contains the starting and ending years. The starting year should be 1948 or after. The ending year can be anything up through the current year. The next set of rows is yearstart through yearend in which the first column of each row contains an integer year and the next 12 columns contain the 12 monthly values for that year. They should be separated by spaces! You must have a missing value at the end of the file followed by a return (even if there is no missing data). You also must have lines for all the years. Choose a missing value not in the range of your timeseries. Using 0 is generally not a good idea. If you don't have 12 monthly values, you can "fool" the code by putting the value for the month you do have and fake values for the rest. If you have seasonal values, put the same value in for each month of the season. You can even fool the code further by leading or lagging your time series. Be sure you have values for all columns and rows even if you don't plan on using them.

The time series can be used by specifying the FULL path in the box after "custom" (you must check custom). You must use a full (not relative) pathname.

You can (currently) anonymous ftp to:

ftp2.psl.noaa.gov
cd Public/incoming/timeseries
put yourfile
You will not be able to see the list of files there though you can do a pwd to see you are in the correct directory. Make your filename unique. For example, something of the format initials.date.description would be good. For example, cas.033199.tempeof1. Then, when typing in the pathname, use the filename /Public/incomping/timeseries/yourfilename (the exact spelling of this is important. Use the / in front of Public and use a capital P.) The code won't work if you haven't formatted your data correctly so if you get no plot, look at the example timeseries carefully (FORTRAN is very unforgiving). Try some test correlations first where you have a pretty good idea of the results before doing more esoteric calculations (e.g. if you have a temperature index file, correlate with temperature and plot the region where the temperature is from).

FTP Problems: If you run into any problems, see FTP common problems and solutions

The index files may be purged periodically so you may need to re-FTP the data.
Click here for sample timeseries.