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Abstract

An extensive network of Remotely Operated Multi-Parameter Stations (ROMPS) has been installed in the last years providing meteorological and hydrological data. Most of the stations are part of the Regional Research Network “Water in Central Asia” (CAWA) funded by the German Federal Foreign Office but additional funding was provided by GFZ through the “Global Change Observatory – Central Asia” (GCO) and the “Advanced Remote Sensing – Ground-truth Demo and Test Facilities” (ACROSS) projects of the Helmholtz Association. In spite of various projects, the technical setup of the stations is largely identical. There are minor differences in the selection of the sensors due to different applications. This means that all measurement parameters do not necessarily have to be available at each station. Usually, a standard set of meteorological sensors such as air temperature, relative humidity, air pressure, wind speed and direction, precipitation, solar radiation, soil moisture, and soil temperature are installed but this can be expanded to include other sensors like a snow measuring system or river discharge system. All data from the hydrometeorological system are sampled by a Campbell datalogger on each station according to a pre-selected sampling rate and written to files. The software requesting the data from the datalogger and writing them to files is called crd. The files are transmitted to a central data storage unit using file-oriented TCP/IP services (scp, ncftp) at GFZ and to the open access web-based Sensor Data Storage System (SDSS). The scope of this document is to describe the data format coming from the ROMPS. Additionally, this document is the basis for processing of data within the SDSS.