[CF-metadata] wind_force bei CF anmelden

From: Steve Emmerson <steve>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 09:02:18 -0600

Martina,

> I am working in the C3Grid (Collaborative Climate Community Grid) which is
> part of the German D-Grid initiative. We use CF standard names for data
> content description.
>
> We would like to register a CF standard name:
>
> standard name: wind_force
> unit: synoptical wind speed classification in classes (0-12 or extended in
> 0-17); the unit is usually refered to as Bft [Beaufort].

Although I have a degree in physical oceanography and a lot of sailing
experience, I must say that there is no unit associated with the
Beaufort scale. One of the characteristics of a unit is that it
supports meaningful arithmetic. In particular, the addition of physical
quantities expressed in a unit must be associative ((a+b)+c = a+(b+c)).
  This doesn't hold for the Beaufort scale.

In my opinion, if would be wiser to convert the wind force values to
speed before attempting to process them using generic software. Such a
transformation lies outside the scope of a units-handling package.

Regards,
Steve Emmerson
UDUNITS Developer
Received on Thu Sep 20 2007 - 09:02:18 BST