[postgis-users] data base structure for holding climate data

[Kirk R. Wythers]

I am curious as to the consensus approach to handling dates in  
postgis? I have gathered up a fairly large collection of climate  
data. The date fields however, came parsed in the form  
(year,month,day). I want to set up a postgres database to hold this  
data with a location structure along the lines of:

mn_climate=# \d sites
                 Table "public.sites"
      Column     |         Type          | Modifiers
----------------+-----------------------+-----------
site_id        | integer               |
site_shortname | character varying(8)  |
site_name      | character varying(50) |
lat            | numeric               |
lon            | numeric               |
utm_e          | numeric               |
utm_n          | numeric               |
Indexes:
     "sites_site_id_key" UNIQUE, btree (site_id)


And tie this "site" table to a second "clim" table that holds the  
actual meteorological data. However, I am inclined to concatenate the  
year, month, day data into a single "date" data type of the form year- 
month-day-hour-minute-second (yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss). Does this make  
sense to you all? If anyone can re-direct me before I do something  
dumb in way I set this up, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

Kirk