Dear useRs, A similar question has previously been asked by another user (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-geo/2011-September/012791.html) but i'll try to discuss it from another angle. Its about data reading. I am trying to read to read a data-set APHRO_MA_050deg_V1101R2.1961.gz from http://www.chikyu.ac.jp/precip/cgi-bin/aphrodite/script/aphrodite_cgi.cgi/download?file=%2FV1101R2%2FAPHRO_MA%2F050deg. I copied the command from previous post which is ccc <-readBin("APHRO_MA_050deg_V1101R2.1961", numeric(), n=1e8, size=4, signed=TRUE, endian='little') Followings are what I know about the structure of data set. The file contains daily fields for 365 days. These daily fields are arranged according to the Julian calendar. Daily fields (data arrays) contain information on the precipitation amount and ratio of 0.05-degree cells containing a rain gauge. In the case the given file which is a 0.5-degree grid file, each field consists of a data array with longitude by latitude dimensions of 180 x 140 elements for APHRO_MA. The first element is a cell at the southwest corner centered at [60.25E, 14.75S], the second is a cell at [60.75E, 14.75S], ..., the 180th is a cell at [149.75E, 14.75S], and the 181st is a cell at [60.25E, 14.25S]. The data files are written in PLAIN DIRECT ACCESS BINARY. In each daily field, the array for precipitation comes first, followed by information on the rain gauge. Each element (both precipitation and rain gauge information) is written as a 4-byte floating-point number in little endian byte order. Users should swap the byte order to big endian if necessary. There are no 'space', 'end of record', or 'end of file' marks in between. As it says that precipitation data is in the form of array which comes first, followed by the information on rain gauge, how do I know which element is precipitation data and which is the information of the rain gauge?Thankyou very much in advance Eliza [[alternative HTML version deleted]]