Help Me Understand the AFGL Methane Profiles

[60south]

I'm looking at the XML atmospheric profile data in ARTS 3.0.0dev8, zip file found here.

In directory "arts-xml-data-3.0.0dev8\planets\Earth\afgl" are a variety of atmospheric profiles for Earth. I assumed these are the same or updated versions of the profiles originally produced by AFGL in 1986, as per the readme.txt. In the original data, the US Standard surface concentration of methane (CH4) was 1.7 PPMV (Table 1f, page 9 of the pdf). Current values are more like 1.9 PPMV, but that's different issue.

Looking in the US Standard methane profile contained in the ARTS 3.0.0 release, in file name CH4.xml, the surface concentration is 1.5e-07. Is that a volume mixing ratio? I'm lousy at math, but if that's a VMR then I think it translates to a concentration of 0.15 PPM, which is wildly different than the original concentration. Other profiles -- subarctic, tropical -- are similar.

So the question is, have I made some bad assumptions, or bad math, or is the data from another planet by mistake?

[riclarsson]

This was an index error in my generation code. The CH4 file contained the CO values. I made a mistake when porting this. The latest [subversion](https://arts.mi.uni-hamburg.de/svn/rt/arts-xml-data/trunk/) contains correct and updated values.

[olemke]

The arts-xml-data-3.0.0dev8.zip file on the pre-release page also contains the corrected data now.

[60south]

The strings and vectors in the XML files no longer have names. Is that intentional?

Thanks

[olemke]

Since the old files were generated there have been internal changes which removed the name attribute. But this has no functional impact when using the new files.