A STANDARD FORMAT FOR REPORTING PILPS EXPERIMENTS

In model inter-comparisons one major obstacle is the format of the rep orted data. To facilitate the analysis of the results from the differe nt models they should all be reported in the same format. This require s that the format is flexible enough to be easily implemented into the different land surface schemes. It should also be fault tolerant and allow a few consistence checks to avoid erroneous data to be submitted . The present note describes such a format developed for the PILPS pro ject. After discussing the aim of this new format we present the routi nes which are used to write and read data. Finally two applications ar e described which allow the user to perform a number of consistency ch ecks on the data.