How do you send observations to NDBC?

Once you have contacted NDBC and provided information about your stations, NDBC will assign and provide unique station identifiers along with a software encoding kit. You must either modify the assignment statements in the C language software to read each measurement from your files, or write a separate software module to create an input file for the encoding kit. The resulting ASCII files will look exactly like NDBC station reports as they arrive at National Weather Service offices. You can then FTP these observations to NDBC for evaluation and eventual distribution.

NDBC will collect and evaluate several days of observations and will give you feedback concerning any possible degraded data. Then, you can create a script to automatically send us your observations every hour, or however frequently you obtain them. NDBC will:

1. Create a separate web page for each station and provide a link to your station from a regional map. Only the last day of observations will be shown on our web page. We will add a link to your organization for users who want historical data or more information about your station.
2. Begin transmitting your reports to the entire meteorological community, and
3. Begin routine monitoring of your data to ensure that degraded data are detected and removed from distribution.