Hi Jon, John and Magnus,
Just a linkage to make here -- that a significant community of folks have been
developing an "Ocean Time Series" (ots) standard for netCDF that addresses many
related issues. I have attached the latest (that I have) version of their
standards document (v0.7). Their main web site is at
http://www.oceansites.org
The OTS group has made an effort to ensure as much compatibility as possible CF --
though doubtless there are areas where we have drifted apart (illustrating the
importance of a "StandardsForge" site at which CF and its relatives can be
actively linked together.) I believe that the OTS standard is designed to handle
only a single time series per file.
- steve
=====================================================================
Jonathan Gregory wrote:
> 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
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--
Steve Hankin, NOAA/PMEL -- Steven.C.Hankin at noaa.gov
7600 Sand Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115-0070
ph. (206) 526-6080, FAX (206) 526-6744
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Received on Wed Jun 15 2005 - 11:55:46 BST
