CF-ers,
I gave a presentation on OpenDAP, CF Conventions, THREDDS & IDV
to a group of ocean modelers today, and they were very enthusiastic.
A fair number of modelers in this group used unstructured grids
(triangle-based) and they were wondering if there were guidelines
for them to follow as well.
Has the CF Group thought about this community?
I did a Google search, and I turned up this statement in one
of the the Earth System Modeling Framework documents that I don't
understand:
(From the Earth Sytem Modeling Framework site
http://www.esmf.ucar.edu/esmf_docs/ESMF_reqdoc/node13.html)
"We assume that the NetCDF conventions for climate and forecast
metadata, ``CF conventions'', will serve as a a basis for ESMF metadata
conventions. NetCDF Climate-Forecast Metadata Conventions [6
<
http://www.esmf.ucar.edu/esmf_docs/ESMF_reqdoc/node16.html#NetCDF_CF_v1_beta3>]
narrow definitions of NetCDF, an array-oriented data format and a
library for gridded data [4
<
http://www.esmf.ucar.edu/esmf_docs/ESMF_reqdoc/node16.html#NetCDF3_UsersGuide_C>],
to allow a unique and complete description of gridded data used in
geoscience. CF conventions specify standard dimensions, such as date or
time (t), height or depth (/z/), latitude (/y/), and longitude (/x/),
and specify standard units for these dimensions and other quantities.
We expect ESMF metadata conventions to be based on the CF-conventions,
and to cover fields defined on both structured and unstructured grids,
as well as observational data. Unlike the CF conventions which are
tightly associated with NetCDF, the ESMF conventions are supposed to be
format neutral, and cover all of the ESMF data formats. These extensions
will become the ESMF standard, and will be enforced by the ESMF I/O
subsystem. However, the specification of ESMF metadata is optional, and
users desiring not to specify any metadata should be able to do so."
Does this mean that the CF folks are working with the ESMF folks, and that
unstructured grid data might be handled in a future release of CF?
Thanks,
Rich
--
Richard P. Signell rsignell at usgs.gov
U.S. Geological Survey Phone: (508) 457-2229
384 Woods Hole Road Fax: (508) 457-2310
Woods Hole, MA 02543-1598
Received on Tue Nov 09 2004 - 15:22:36 GMT
