The file is used for introducing time series of several different variables representing one particular class group. The time series can be observations used for evaluation of the model, e.g. rswe snow water equivalent.

The file is located in the otherobsdir folder set in info.txt. If the path is not set, the file is seached for in forcingdir. File should include a continuous time period of values for each time step, which doesn’t need to cover the whole simulation time period. Missing values should be given as -9999.

The first row(s) may be commment rows. These rows have to start with !!. At least one comment row is needed. The first row, not a comment row, gives the variable names. For the first column, the date column, the name “date” can be used (no name may not be omitted). The third row gives which subbasin (subid in GeoData.txt) the column’s data is given for. The date column may in this case belong to subbasin 0 (may not be omitted). The first column is date in format yyyy-mm-dd [HH:MM]. If set in info.txt that matlab-format should be read (readformat 1) the date format is yyyymmdd[HHMM]. Second to last columns are data columns.

Example snippet of Xcgobs_CG5.txt file for classgroup named CG5:

!!Comment, this file hold observed snow water equivalent for CG5
date         rswe  rswe  ...
0            1234  1245  ...
1990-01-01   0     0     ...
1990-01-02   1     5.5   ...
... 

Observation variables that can be given in Xcgobs.txt are tabled here, but only those for subbasin area or subbasin land area can be used for classgroups.

Column Agg. indicates the type of aggregation of the variables. The type determines how the variable is treated when asked for as an output variable or in a criterion calculation. The meanperiod of the output/criterion determines the period over which the variables values will be aggregated. They observation variables will be averaged or summed according to the type of aggregation.