Hi Don:
My own opinion is that CF is not currently adequate for writing observational data to NetCDF. The basic limitation in section 5.4 is that
float humidity(time,pressure,station)
float pressure(pressure);
double time(time);
requires the same number and values of the time and pressure coordinates at each station.
We've made up some conventions at Unidata, and have been testing them. You can see it at:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf-java/formats/UnidataObsConvention.html
I plan to submit to CF as a proposal, but I havent had time to revise it, or write it up as a proposal. Comments by anyone would be welcome. If there were a few others wanting to see this through, perhaps its time to do so.
John
Don Morton wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I apologize if this question is too elementary, or not "directly" applicable
> to this list, but I've Googled and searched around a bit, and this seems
> like my best avenue.
>
> I am interested in taking lots of surface obs (currently in flat ASCII files -
> one file per station, records sorted by obs time) and putting them in a
> netCDF format. I'd also like to do this only once, and it appears that maybe
> CF is the convention I should adhere to.
>
> I'm wondering if there are example scripts or programs out there that
> demonstrate
> the writing of time series of surface obs (e.g. METARs) into a CF-compliant
> netCDF file. I don't need any hand-holding (I hope); I've used netCDF API in
> Fortran before (for simple stuff), and am just hoping I can find some example
> that shows how the variables are written into the file, what
> atrributes are attached,
> etc. I've seen the CF 1.0 document, but just feel like an example would be so
> much more helpful.
>
> Thanks for any help,
>
> Don Morton
Received on Tue Aug 07 2007 - 15:20:50 BST
