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Abstract

An extensive network of Remotely Operated Multi-Parameter Stations (ROMPS) has been installed in
the last years providing meteorological and hydrological data. Most of the stations are part of the
Regional Research Network “Water in Central Asia” (CAWA) funded by the German Federal Foreign
Office but additional funding was provided by GFZ through the “Global Change Observatory – Central
Asia” (GCO) and the “Advanced Remote Sensing – Ground-truth Demo and Test Facilities” (ACROSS)
projects of the Helmholtz Association. In spite of various projects, the technical setup of the stations is
largely identical. There are minor differences in the selection of the sensors due to different applications.
This means that all measurement parameters do not necessarily have to be available at each station.
Usually, a standard set of meteorological sensors such as air temperature, relative humidity, air
pressure, wind speed and direction, precipitation, solar radiation, soil moisture, and soil temperature are
installed but this can be expanded to include other sensors like a snow measuring system or river
discharge system.
All data from the hydrometeorological system are sampled by a Campbell datalogger on each station
according to a pre-selected sampling rate and written to files. The software requesting the data from the
datalogger and writing them to files is called crd. The files are transmitted to a central data storage unit
using file-oriented TCP/IP services (scp, ncftp) at GFZ and to the open access web-based Sensor Data
Storage System (SDSS).
The scope of this document is to describe the data format coming from the ROMPS. Additionally, this
document is the basis for processing of data within the SDSS.