UK Hourly Sun data - .hsun (hourly sunshine observations) file format

PLEASE NOTE: The file format described below refers to the Met Office Land Surface data (1900-2000) dataset which has been superseded by the Met Office MIDAS dataset (1853-present) at the BADC.

A list of UK stations for which the BADC holds .hsun files is available (.hsun stations).

The file name convention is (STATION_NAME)(YEAR).(MESSAGE_TYPE).(FILE_EXTENSION)

• STATION_NAMES is the complete station name.
  
• YEAR is the year expressed in full, ie 1998.
  
• Description of the message types is available.
  
• The file extension is .hsun meaning that the file contains hourly sunshine measurements.
  

These .hsun files contain sunshine duration measured during the hour ending at the specified time.
Year of first hourly sunshine data is 1980.

-999 indicates a missing value.

The first line of the data file are the fields headers (which are detailed in the table below).

The fields in the .hsun data files are :

HEADER	PARAMETER	FIELDS	COLUMNS	UNITS	COMMENTS
ID	Station Number	1	1-8	-	-
IDTYPE	-	2	9-17	-	-
MET_DOM	Meteorological Domain	3	18-28	-	Message types
YEAR	Year	4	29-35	-	4 characters
MON	Month	5	36-43	-	1 or 2 characters (from 1 to 12)
DAY	Day	6	44-51	-	1 or 2 characters (from 1 to 31max)
TIME	Hour	7	52-59	-	Hour of observation from 0 to 2300
SUN_DUR	Sunshine duration	8	60-68	0.1 hour	See Met Office documentation

More information about the sunshine and radiation network is available in the documentation provided by the Met Office.