[CF-metadata] stations and trajectories (the OTS standard)

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:27:14 +0100

Dear Steve

I'm pleased to see that CF is some use to OTS. Three points strike me about it:

* They have chosen to dimension their timeseries for single sites as
(time,depth,lat,lon) with lat=lon=1 and have then introduced a special
convention for sensors which are moving, to handle time-dependent lat and
lon. But instead they could be CF-compliant by dimensioning the data variable
as (time,depth) and giving it a coordinates attribute to point to auxiliary
coordinate variables of lat(time) and lon(time). If lat and lon are not
changing then it would be OK to have auxiliary coordinate variables of
size one. These are what CF calls "scalar coordinate variables" and they
avoid introducing a size-one dimension just to attach coordinate info.

* CF provides a method to attach quality-control info to data variables,
which OTS could extend to meet their needs in this area (CF 3.4).

* They probably would like some additions to the standard name table.

We could discuss any of these issues on this email list.

Best wishes

Jonathan
Received on Wed Jun 15 2005 - 12:27:14 BST