UK Hourly Rain data - .hrain (hourly rain 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NOTE: The file format described below refers to the Met Office Land Surface data (1900-2000) dataset which has been superseded by the Met Office MIDAS dataset (1853-present) at the BADC.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 .hrain files is available (.hrain 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 .hrain meaning that the file contains hourly rain measurements.
  

These .hrain files contain rainfall amount and duration during the hour(s) ending at the specified time.

-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 .hrain data files are :

HEADER	PARAMETER	FIELDS	COLUMNS	UNITS	COMMENTS
ID	Raingauge Number	1	1-8	-	Rainfall observing site identification
IDTYPE	-	2	9-17	-	Rainfall observing site identification
MET_DOM	Meteorological Domain	3	18-28	-	Message types
YEAR	Year	4	29-35	-	4 characters
MONTH	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)
END_HOUR	Hour	7	52-61	-	Hour of observation from 0 to 2300
COUNT	Observation period	8	62-69	hours	See COUNT definition
AMT	Precipitation Amount	9	70-77	0.1 mm	See Met Office documentation
DUR	Precipitation duration	10	78-85	minutes	See Met Office documentation

Rain Observation Data is available from over 4000 raingauge stations.

General information about the Rainfall Network is available in the documentation provided by the Met Office.