The Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) shares your concerns about the potential for computer-related problems that could be brought on by the advent of the new millenium; the so-called "Year 2000 Problem". We have inspected the data bases that we distribute and have determined that some of them express the year of an observation or data value using only the last two digits of the year. None of the files containing two-digit years are executable ones; they are simply data files and therefore will not present problems for users' computer operating systems or other software. Users simply need to be familiar with the format of data records they may read from these data bases, just as they normally would. All CDIAC's data bases contain complete documentation via flat ASCII text (.txt) files. The formats of all variables, including year, are clearly given in these files. For users' convenience, all data bases also contain Fortran and SAS programs that may be used to read the data. Depending on your application of the data, you may find it necessary to convert any two-digit years to four-digit on your own after reviewing the documentation and reading in the data.

We hope that the presence of two-digit year data in CDIAC data products does not inconvenience you. Our goal is to convert all two-digit year data to four-digit year data as quickly as resources permit. If you have specific concerns, please let us know.

CDIAC
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

(865) 574-0390
(865) 574-2232 (FAX)
cdiac@ornl.gov

Data and Information Requests: (865) 574-3645