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NOTE: The file format described below refers to the Met Office Land Surface data (1900-2000) dataset which has been superseded by the Met Office MIDAS dataset (1853-present) at the BADC.

The surface observation data are in a simple ASCII format.

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

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

These .tsoil files contain soil temperatures reported daily and hourly. Daily soil temperatures are usually measured at depths of 30 cm and 100 cm, at 0900Z. Hourly soil temperatures are usually measured at a 10 cm depth. The soil temperature data begins in 1908.

-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 .tsoil data files are :

HEADER PARAMETER FIELDS COLUMNS UNITS COMMENTS
ID Station Number 1 1-8 - Station identification
IDTYPE - 2 9-17 - Station identification
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
SL_T_5CM Soil temperature at 5cm 8 60-69 0.1 degree Celsius See Met Office documentation
SL_T_10CM Soil temperature at 10cm 9 70-80 0.1 degree Celsius See Met Office documentation
SL_T_20CM Soil temperature at 20cm 10 81-91 0.1 degree Celsius See Met Office documentation
SL_T_30CM Soil temperature at 30cm 11 92-102 0.1 degree Celsius See Met Office documentation
SL_T_50CM Soil temperature at 50cm 12 103-113 0.1 degree Celsius See Met Office documentation
SL_T_100CM Soil temperature at 100cm 13 114-125 0.1 degree Celsius See Met Office documentation


More information about the Met Office surface data is available in the documentation provided by the Met Office.