[CF-metadata] GIS versus CF conventions

From: John Caron <caron>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 16:06:57 -0600

Hi,

The issue of representing GIS information has come up again in the
context of development of a WCS server for netCDF data (on the
galeon at unidata.ucar.edu mailing list). The particular issue is how to
avoid this situation for a Web Coverage Service:

   ... roughly 16/17ths of the resulting netCDF file is geolocation
   information. For each pixel there are two double precision location
   values ( lat and lon) for 1 byte of actual image payload. Is there
   any way of requesting the image data from the server without the
   geolocation lat/lon arrays?

There is a desire to avoid storing a redundant lat/lon grid of doubles
in addition to parameters in the file that are already sufficient for
georeferencing. This would require a change to the CF conventions.

This issue has been raised before, but I'm not sure we had such a good
example of the need for a better solution than the current CF
conventions provide.

John
Received on Thu Aug 25 2005 - 16:06:57 BST