[CF-metadata] Variables vs Attributes

From: NGalbraith <ngalbraith>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 12:11:28 -0500

Hi All -

I have looked through the mailing list archive and the on-line
documentation on CF and not seen anything that relates directly
to this. If there's a document that does, please point me to it,
meanwhile, apologies if this has been discussed already. (If there
is a way to search the archive, it would be helpful.)

In a new standard being developed for a project called oceansites,
we have attempted to adhere to the CF conventions. One problem
I've encountered is that we've specified attributes for some
fields that I would normally assign as global attributes.

The work-around people are choosing is to make these into scalar
variables. I suspect that this will make it more difficult
to work with this data in the long run, as there are going
to be massive amounts of data, and the metadata will need to
be extracted separately to allow access to the files. Something
like 'ncdump -h' will not provide enough info on these files to
let a remote system assess them.

Example:
     char PLATFORM_NUMBER(STRING8);
     long_name = "Mooring unique identifier";
     conventions = "WMO identifier";
     _FillValue = " ";

I've seen some discussion on the use of scalars for attributes,
but not specifically for what I would normally specify as a global
attribute.

These files crash the CF-checker, but I'm not entirely sure that
the problem is with the attribute-variables.

Any advice on this would be appreciated.

Cheers - Nan Galbraith

*********************************************************************
* Nan Galbraith MS 29 *
* Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Woods Hole, MA 02543 *
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Received on Tue Dec 14 2004 - 10:11:28 GMT