Details of Specific File Formats

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Broadly speaking, the VELMA simulator needs two types of input or driver data: Spatial and Temporal. A spatial data value is something associated with a particular cell location. A temporal data value is somethingassociated with a particular time step of a simulation run. Spatial data is nearly always input from files in ESRI Grid ASCII format (.asc), while temporal data is input from files with either comma-separated value format(.csv), or simple text files (.txt)

ESRI Grid ASCII (.asc)

A raster GIS file format specified by ESRI. See this Wikipedia article for an overview: "ESRI grid"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESRI_grid

Comma-Separated Value (.csv)

An informal, de-facto standard format that represents tabular data in a file as a sequence of lines (rows) of comma-separated values (columns). There is no formal standard for CSV data, but good overviews are provided by this Wikipedia article:

"Comma-separated values" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_value And this RFC document:

"RFC 4180 - Common Format and MIME Type for Comma-Separated Values (CSV) Files" http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180

Simple Text Files (.txt)

These are plain-text files of the sort created by Microsoft's Text Editor, or by saving a Microsoft Word document as "Plain Text".