2025-09-08 CF Conventions Committee and Standard Names Committee meeting

Attendees

Jonathan, David, Luke, Roy, Daniel, Lars, Seth, Fran, Karl, Chris, Alison

Membership changes

• Roy: Announced retirement plans (started with the organization in 2004, remaining available for questions)
• Ellie: Submitted resignation due to starting PhD program (time constraints, not lack of interest)

Consolidated Rules/Contributing Guidelines

• Still pending completion (Jonathan delayed due to work on anomalies and leap seconds) - Issue https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/issues/369

Meeting Minutes Publication

• Current gap in published summaries (last published: 2025-01-27, previous: 2023-09-29)
• Decision needed on format: detailed internal records vs. brief public summaries
• Agreed to explore using LLM (Claude.ai) for summary generation
• Current minutes published at: https://cfconventions.org/Committees/Conventions_and_Standard_Names/committee_meeting_minutes.html

CF Workshop Preparation (Tuesday 15:10 UTC)

• Presenter: TBD
• Couple of slides only (time constraints)
• Possible content:
  • Noteworthy developments from the past year
  • CF governance structure and community leadership
  • Consensus and change management processes
  • Reminder of different repositories (vocabularies, discussions, cf-conventions)
  • How we agree to changes/consensus/revisiting changes
  • Do folk know how CF is governed? That it’s community led, etc.
• Action Item: David to start shared slide deck

Lake Variables Standard Names

• Standard names for lake variables requiring new approach to naming conventions: https://github.com/cf-convention/vocabularies/issues/25
• This issue could use aliases, but this is a different type of alias than we’ve used in the past - i.e. it’s an alternative (synonym, alias that is not deprecated)
• Aliases are used to deprecate names (better idea, deepened understanding), this is a different concept.
• Bringing in a new concept (synonym) during a huge transition change is a challenge and may not be a good idea.
• Could make them aliases, and add a new XML tag to indicate “synonym”. Is that less disruptive …?
  • This could be confusing (i.e. an alias that is not really an alias!)
  • Better to introduce (whenever appropriate - no or later) the new thing - synonym
• To re-purpose aliases “would be a disaster” (as it would confuse downstream applications on what is/isn’t a true deprecation).
• One physical concept with 3 different names (that can be considered the same for intercomparison purposes - sea_water, inland_water, sea_or_inland_water)
  • An alias is not a separate entry in the table to its parent name. But we don’t want our new names to be “normal” aliases.
• Even adding a tag to alias is tricky, as the information needs to propagate through all sorts of systems (CF editor, website, ….)
• How would you refer to sea water and not inland water?:
  • Uses cell methods with an area type
  • This proposal is for standard names only - not area types
• What do we call an estuary? - that’s a case where we don’t want to decide!
• What do you call a continuous measurement that starts in a lake, goes down a river and out into the ocean?
  • sea_or_inland_water
• Are there any use cases where sea_or_inland_water would cause problems, that we can think of?
• This is similar territory to open sea and sea ice
• Label “synonym” could be tricky, because it has baggage in the semantics community.
• Useful discussion, that shows we don’t know yet how to technically implement the agreed solution.
  • Need to minimise headaches to the maximum number of people!
• Jonathan to post on issue that the principle is agreed, but the implementation requires further technical discussion possible off-line working group …)

Actions

1. David: Create shared slide deck for CF workshop presentation
2. Jonathan: Post on GitHub issue https://github.com/cf-convention/vocabularies/issues/255 regarding agreed principle and need for technical implementation discussion
3. Committee: Determine CF workshop presenter
4. Committee: Review and approve LLM-generated meeting summaries before publication
5. Jonathan: Complete consolidated rules/contributing guidelines when time permits

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