Last week someone caught that some of the suominet listed station
heights in the Indian Ocean were up to 8 meters different from another
center submitting results.
I had been using black box code to compute the geoid offsets in creating
netcdf files and reading my netcdf files to get the MSL heights shown in
http://www.suominet.ucar.edu/data/PWV_LatLon.table and
http://www.suominet.ucar.edu/data/Global_LatLon.table and thinking that
while the results did not match what I would get with manual run with
typing in latitude and longitude of some EGM96 spherical harmonic Geoid
model software I have that the differences were under a meter. That
was only true in North America interior areas.
I tracked down the inputs to the black box code and found it was using a
binary gridded table of geoid offsets that had been computed with an
antiquated jgm2 model with only 70 coefficients. Wednesday I replaced
that gridded table with one I created using EMG96 with 360
coefficients. Some of the Caribbean Island sites also had up to 8
meters of height change.
So if you use the netcdf files you may notice this offset. If you use
the ascii PWV files you need to get the upgraded LatLonHeight files if 5
to 8 meters change on the station height will impact your results.
I'm very sorry for the inconvenience of this.
Regards,
Teresa and the Suominet team.
