The PP-format (Post Processing Format) is a proprietary

file format A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...

for meteorological data developed by the

Met Office The Met Office, until November 2000 officially the Meteorological Office, is the United Kingdom's national weather and climate service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and ...

, the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

's national

weather Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloud cover, cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmo ...

service. Simulations of the

are performed by the Met Office's

Unified Model The Unified Model is a numerical weather prediction and climate modeling software suite originally developed by the United Kingdom Met Office from 1990 and now both used and further developed by many weather-forecasting agencies around the world. ...

, which can be used for

Numerical Weather Prediction Numerical weather prediction (NWP) uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to weather forecasting, predict the weather based on current weather conditions. Though first attempted in the 1920s, it was not until the advent of comput ...

Climatology Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "slope"; and , '' -logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. Climate concerns the atmospher ...

, and data is collected. This data is usually meteorological in nature and may include averaged data for parameters like global surface temperatures or accumulations of rainfall for locations inside the model, though the Unified Model is capable of outputting many sophisticated diagnostics to PP-format. These files are binary streams, structured in a proprietary file format which can then be processed and transformed into other, more portable, formats. The main reason for using such a format is to increase the rate at which data can be written from the model to disk, a major consideration when running a simulation that must be timely and efficient.

References

Earth sciences data formats Met Office {{Climate-stub