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Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment Tutorial: Publishing a Microbial Density Time Series as a Txt File
Citation:
Whelan, G., K. Wolfe, R. Parmar, M. Galvin, M. Molina, M. Gray, AND P. Duda. Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment Tutorial: Publishing a Microbial Density Time Series as a Txt File. U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development, Washington, DC, EPA/600/B-15/274, 2015.
Impact/Purpose:
Publish a microbial density time series as a Unicode Transformation Format using 8-bit code units (UTF-8) file.
Description:
A SARA Timeseries Utility supports analysis and management of time-varying environmental data including listing, graphing, computing statistics, computing meteorological data and saving in a WDM or text file. File formats supported include WDM, HSPF Binary (.hbn), USGS RDB, and Text (txt) files (using the same import scripts as WDMUtil and BASINS). WDMUtil users will find that most of its functionality is included in this utility. In particular, the SARA Timeseries Utility is being used to publish a time series of microbial densities that can be viewed or consumed by other components, such as the Microbial Risk Assessment-Interface Tool (MRA-IT), which is a MathCad-based, integrated software tool based on the pathogen of interest, exposure, intake, and dose. MRA-IT consumes txt files using a Unicode Transformation Format using 8-bit code units (UTF-8), which is a character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters in Unicode using 8-bit code units. The SARA Timeseries Utility tool produces UTF-16, which is a character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters in Unicode using 16-bit code units. The objective of this effort was to modify the SARA Timeseries Utility to produce txt files in a UTF-8 format, which contributes to a seamless communication with components such as MRA-IT. This tutorial reviews some of the screens, icons, and basic functions of the SARA Timeseries Utility tool, which allows users to publish Hydrological Simulation Program – FORTRAN (HSPF) data as a UTF-8 txt file.