Negative Dates in Auspice Timeline When Using YY-XX-XX Format

General
1

Hi,
I’m encountering an issue where the Auspice timeline displays large negative date values (e.g., -89900). In my metadata file, the date column is formatted as YY-XX-XX - for example, 26-XX-XX for the year 2026 with unknown month and day.

Thanks in advance for your help!

2

Hi @Komal,

Assuming you are using Augur commands to produce the Auspice JSON, your date column needs to be formatted in the ISO 8601 format YYYY-MM-DD (see supported date formats).

In your example, the 26-XX-XX date needs to be transformed to 2026-XX-XX. You can do this with the augur curate format-dates command:

augur curate format-dates \
  --metadata <path-to-metadata.tsv> \
  --date-fields date \
  --expected-date-formats %y-XX-XX \
  --output-metadata output-metadata.tsv

The produced output-metadata.tsv should have the properly formatted dates that can be used for other Augur commands.

Best,
Jover