Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest Draft ... - Cal Fire

Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest Draft Management Plan, June 2008
Detailed Information on How to Sort the Station Index File
A Registered Professional Forester working on a company ownership will likely be interested in
rainfall data from one to several counties in California. We suggest the following procedure for
quickly locating available stations within a given county:
‣ Open the Station Index Excel file on the DWR Climate webpage, located under “Rainfall
Depth-Duration-Frequency Data (preliminary).”
‣ Save the Station Index file to your personal computer (must save it to be able to sort).
‣ From the menu tool bar, select “Data” and click on “Sort.”
‣ Highlight the entire spreadsheet, except the initial row displaying header information
(4906 rows).
‣ Sort by columns I (county [sort ascending]), L (latitude [sort descending]), and K
(longitude [sort descending]) [or other desired attributes].
‣ Save the revised file to your hard drive.
The result of this sorting is a file in which the stations are sorted by county, and under each
county, they are listed from north to south, and for any given latitude, from east to west. If you
get the approximate latitude and longitude for the crossing site, then you can easily go to the
correct county and identify the station(s) in that county that are closest to the crossing site. Note
that not all of the stations in the index will have hourly depth-duration-frequency data. Then one
can open the correct folder under Rain H DDF Hourly on the website and compare the available
stations with hourly data in the county of interest to the list of stations from the Station Index file.
Once the Station Index file is downloaded, saved, and sorted as above, the RPF can remove all
of the stations that will not be needed. Also, if the RPF works in a specific area, the list of
stations for that area (e.g., Trinity County) can be printed out for future reference so that one does
not always have to open up the file – one can just look at the printed list and then go to the
database on the web and get the data.
86