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Precis Forecast Products

What follows is a description of a series of new products designed for use by computer processes that can read the contents of the file and reproduce it in a different format.

There are eight Australia-specific Precis (summary) forecast products - one National product and one for each State / Territory. The national product is a composite of the State and Territory products. The products are:

Note, the products are made available from our ftp site. For details on how to access our FTP site please view the following information:
ftp://ftp2.bom.gov.au/anon/gen/index.html

Products exists as a ".dat" file whose contents is a series of rows. The first row describes the fields while all other rows contain forecast information for one particular location. A description of the data / fields in each of the precis forecast files follows:

location Location for which Precis forecast applies (field size: 30)
state State in which "Location" resides (field size: 3)
forecast_date Date for which forecast applies (format: YYYYMMDD)
issue_date Date when forecast is issued (format: YYYYMMDD)
issue_time Time when forecast is issued (format: HHMMDD)
min_0 Forecasted minimum temperature for "forecast_date"
max_0 Forecasted maximum temperature for "forecast_date"
min_1 Forecasted minimum temperature for "forecast_date" + 1 day
max_1 Forecasted maximum temperature for "forecast_date" + 1 day
min_2 Forecasted minimum temperature for "forecast_date" + 2 day
max_2 Forecasted maximum temperature for "forecast_date" + 2 day
min_3 Forecasted minimum temperature for "forecast_date" + 3 day
max_3 Forecasted maximum temperature for "forecast_date" + 3 day
min_4 Forecasted minimum temperature for "forecast_date" + 4 day
max_4 Forecasted maximum temperature for "forecast_date" + 4 day
forecast_0 Short forecast summary for "forecast_date"
forecast_1 Short forecast summary for "forecast_date" + 1 day
forecast_2 Short forecast summary for "forecast_date" + 2 day
forecast_3 Short forecast summary for "forecast_date" + 3 day
forecast_4 Short forecast summary for "forecast_date" + 4 day


Notes on the file contents:

  • first line of file contains field names
  • fields are separated by #
  • "min..." and "max..." are integer fields
  • "forecast..." are text fields
  • field size limits do not exist
  • the file is updated whenever there is a change in its contents

See also the information on data feeds available for computer ingestion.

 

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