Some quality control of the provisional hourly data obtained from the USGS (described below) has been done at NWS-HL.  These quality controlled hourly, observed data will be used to calculate comparative statistics with simulated flows for DMIP.

This quality control was a manual and subjective process accomplished through visual inspection of observed hydrographs.  Flow values were not interpolated during this quality control.  Most commonly, suspect portions of the hydrograph were simply set as missing.  Hydrographs sections with (1) a sudden rise and no rain, (2) a sudden fall, or (3) a perfectly horizontal slope were candidates for correction.  In many cases,  the suspect portions of the hydrographs identified at HL correspond to missing data in the quality controlled USGS mean daily flow record.  Thus, setting the hourly data to "missing" during these periods seems justified.

QC'd files here are zipped using the GZIP program.

· Blue River at Blue, OK (bluo2.mod.gz)
· Elk River at Tiff City (tifm7.mod.gz)
· Illinois River at Watts (wtto2.mod.gz)
· Illinois River at Tahlequah (talo2.mod.gz)
· Baron Fork at Eldon (eldo2.mod.gz)
 

USGS Provisional Hourly Data Shifted to Z-time

The original hourly streamflow data for all basins were provided by USGS in the form of flat-format files.  These data were then converted into OH format with units of CMS by this Lab. The time has also been converted from local time to z-time. (Jan 15, 2002 update was made to correctly account for daylight savings time). Please note that the data from 10/1/99 to 9/30/00 are provisional and subject to revision based on USGS's analysis. We would like to thank many folks in USGS for taking the time to make these data available. To name a few, they are: Darrell at darrell@usgs.gov, Elton Porter at jeporter@usgs.gov, and Lee Ann Alf at lalf@usgs.gov.

A hourly streamflow file is composed of comments (started with $), two-line header and then followed by streamflow data in (Month/Year Hour Streamflow) format. Date of month is hidden from file, instread, every 24-line represent one day. File header example:

DATACARD       SQIN    L3/T     CMS

 6 1993     9  1998    1      F9.3

· Blue River at Blue, OK (updated Jan 15,2002)
· Elk River at Tiff City (updated Jan 15,2002)
· Illinois River at Watts (updated Jan 15,2002)
· Illinois River at Tahlequah (updated Jan 15,2002)
· Baron Fork at Eldon (updated Jan 15,2002)
· Cheat River Basin, WV (not updated)