Overview

Imports time series data from files in CSV format with three header lines containing a description of the time series:

• The first line contains the location names, but the line is used only to determine the field separator and the decimal separator (see below)
• The second line contains the keyword "Location Ids" as the first field and then the IDs for the locations for which the time series are given. These IDs are the external IDs, found in an ID map.
• The third line contains the IDs of the parameters.
• All other lines contain the time (in yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS format) as the first field and the values for each time series in the next fields.
• Values between -1000.0 and -999.0 (inclusive) are regarded as missing values.

Furthermore, if you need to specify the unit in which the parameter value is expressed, you can do this by adding the unit in square brackets to the ID of the parameter:

Rainfall [mm/day]

would thus mean the rainfall expressed in mm per day.

The CSV files can be supplied in a ZIP file.

Import type

The import type is CSV. There is no particular file extension required.

Example

Here is a simple example:

Location Names,Bewdley,Saxons Lode
Location Ids,EA_H-2001,EA_H-2032
Time,Rainfall,Rainfall
2003-03-01 01:00:00,-999,-999
2003-03-01 01:15:00,1.000,1.000
2003-03-01 01:30:00,2.000,2.000
2003-03-01 01:45:00,3.000,3.000
2003-03-01 02:00:00,4.000,4.000
2003-03-01 02:15:00,-999,5.000
2003-03-01 02:30:00,6.000,6.000
2003-03-01 02:45:00,7.000,7.000
2003-03-01 03:00:00,8.000,8.000
2003-03-01 03:15:00,9.000,9.000
2003-03-01 03:30:00,10.000,10.000
2003-03-01 03:45:00,11.000,11.000
2003-03-01 04:00:00,12.000,12.000
2003-03-01 04:15:00,13.000,13.000
2003-03-01 04:30:00,14.000,14.986

Details of the import format

If the first line contains a comma, the decimal separator is taken to be a period (.), otherwise it is supposed to be a semicolon (;) and the decimal separator is taken to be a comma. This way locale-specific CSV files are supported.

The field separator is either a comma or a semicolon. Tabs are not supported.

Java source code

CsvTimeSeriesParser.java