Hi Roy -
> Reporting the intake depth is one thing, but as we all know this
> isn't the depth of measurement. But the surface of the sea isn't
> always flat and ships tend to bounce around a bit, making measurment
> depth more of a range than a value!
If you think ships bounce, try riding a buoy sometime. Point being just
that
we need to document the method of determining depth, and a standard would
be useful.
> The question we need to address is 'How many distinct phenomena do we want to describe through Standard Names?'. In CF, we have 'sea_water_temperature', 'sea_surface_temperature' and 'surface temperature'. The definition for 'sea_surface_temperature' is:
>
>'Sea surface temperature is usually abbreviated as 'SST'. It is the temperature of sea water near the surface (including the part under sea-ice, if any), and not the skin temperature, whose standard name is surface_temperature. For the temperature of sea water at a particular depth or layer, a data variable of sea_water_temperature with a vertical coordinate axis should be used.'
>
>
>Thus we have something that maps directly to GHRSST-PP SSTdepth (sea_surface_temperature) and SSTfnd (sea_water_temperature) and (maybe more controversially) SSTint (surface_temperature).
>
My reading of the CF sst definition is that it is deprecated, if not
ruled out, for data
at a specific depth, so it would be preferable to map
sea_water_temperature(depth)
to the ghrsst-pp SSTdepth.
- Nan
--
**************************************************************
* Nan Galbraith Upper Ocean Processes Group *
* Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Woods Hole, MA 02540 *
* http://uop.whoi.edu (508) 289-2444 *
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Received on Thu Aug 16 2007 - 09:28:07 BST
