[CF-metadata] stations and trajectories

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:00:06 +0100

Dear John and Magnus

> Is the intention that be a unique identifier ?
We do not currently have a standard list of string identifiers for stations,
but we could adopt or adapt one if there's one you'd like to use (as we did
with region names).

> In the case im trying to deal with, we have a unique id, a description
> and optionally a wmo id associated with each station. In general, one
> could have arbitrary information you want to associate with each station.
Yes, that's fine. Any number of additional labels (of any data type) could be
attached to the data variable through the coordinates attribute.

If each timeseries has different time coordinates, you would need a separate
dimension, time coordinate variable and data variable for each, as you both
remark. But what alternative could there be? There isn't any way round storing
that information, is there. What format did you use in the SQL database,
Magnus? - was each timeseries a separate table, or did you put them all in
one table.

NetCDF-4 could make things a bit tidier by associating the coordinate and data
variable by putting them in a group or a structure. However that will not
reduce the amount of information to be stored.

Cheers

Jonathan
Received on Sat Jun 11 2005 - 09:00:06 BST