The interoperable CSV format (iCSV) is a versatile and intuitive format that merges the self-documenting capabilities of NetCDF with the human-friendly readability and writeability of CSV.

Format

The iCSV format has been primarily designed for the exchange and preservation of time series data in environmental data repositories but can also support a much broader use as very few metadata are mandatory (but many are available). Being a text format, it should remain easily readable in decades to come, thus supporting long term data preservation. For comprehensive details about the format, refer to its official format documentation.

When using iCSV with MeteoIO, the following additional MetaData is required:

Timestamp or Julian field: This represents the timestamps of the measurement in ISO format.
Location: This should be specified either in the header or in the appropriate column as a location for a station. Only POINT(x y) or POINTZ(x y z) formats are supported.
Timezone: This should be specified in the METADATA section, or as part of the ISO timestamp string.

Please note that MeteoIO currently does not support handling additional information on the fields, such as long_name. Such information will be ignored.

Units

All units are coherent derived SI units (section 2.3.4 in the SI-Brochure). It is however possible to use multipliers and offsets (but they must be specified in the FIELDS section).

Keywords

This plugin uses the following keywords:

METEOPATH: meteo files directory where to read/write the meteofiles; [Input] and [Output] sections
METEOFILE#: input filename (in METEOPATH). As many meteofiles as needed may be specified. If nothing is specified, the METEOPATH directory will be scanned for files ending in ".icsv" and sorted in ascending order;
METEOPATH_RECURSIVE: if set to true, the scanning of METEOPATH is performed recursively (default: false); [Input] section;
SNOWPACK_SLOPES: if set to true and no slope information is found in the input files, the IMIS/Snowpack naming scheme will be used to derive the slope information (default: false, [Input] section). *
iCSV_APPEND: when an output file already exists, should the plugin try to append data (default: false); [Output] section
iCSV_OVERWRITE: when an output file already exists, should the plugin overwrite it (default: true)? [Output] section
ACDD_WRITE: add the Attribute Conventions Dataset Discovery (ACDD) metadata to the headers (then the individual keys are provided according to the ACDD class documentation) (default: false, [Output] section)
iCSV_SEPARATOR: choice of field delimiter, options are: [,;:|/]; [Output] section

Note: There is a python module available to read iCSV files, see snowpat