Fwd: [CF-metadata] Surface Air Temperature

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 18:05:00 +0000

Dear Roy

Sorry I've been slow in replying to this. I have been thinking about it but
haven't really got any profound conclusions. In general I agree with you that
it would be good not to have such an imprecise term as sea_surface_temperature,
meaning the bulk temperature, not the skin temperature. For model results,
what is called SST is often actually the temperature of the top model layer,
and in that case it should *not* be called SST but sea_water_temperature with
a depth coordinate (e.g. 5 m, the centre of the top layer in HadCM3), as you
would prefer. The help for SST in the standard name table says this. SST is
more likely to be used for observationally based datasets used for comparison
with models. For a data synthesis, it would not really possible to identify a
particular depth, would it.

As for the surface_temperature (i.e. the skin temperature, which must be the
same for the air and the water, I believe), I think it's more convenient to
identify this by name, than to insist on the presence of a depth coordinate
of zero. The latter is also less reliable as an indicator, because many
equivalent choices could be made e.g. depth=0 m, height=0 m. CF has several
named "surfaces" in the standard names, among which "the" surface is one
(others are tropopause, top of atmosphere).

Best wishes

Jonathan
Received on Thu Oct 30 2003 - 11:05:00 GMT