Hi Christiane,
There are the same difficulties in the observational oceanographic community with netCDF and alternative formats seem to sit comfortably side-by-side with netCDF. There are even pretty close analogues to NASA AMES - essentially spreadsheets with a metadata heading.
There is, however, one area where we are working with these formats in SeaDataNet which is the adoption of standardised descriptions for parameters. NASA AMES with parameters described using CF Standard Names is significantly more valuable than NASA AMES with plaintext parameter descriptions. Might this be a first step for your observational community?
Cheers, Roy.
>>> Christiane Textor <christiane.textor at lsce.ipsl.fr> 11/11/07 4:17 PM >>>
Dear Colleagues,
As I am working in a project were a data base on atmospheric composition
data is created (www.geomon.eu), I have been talking a lot to colleagues
from the observational communities. First of all, they rarely use the
netCDF format. Secondly, I have realized that the names we are defining
for chemicals and aerosols are rather biased towards the modeling world.
Therefore, the observationalists are not so much in favour of the CF
convention. In the common efforts of harmonizing data and metadata
formats of observational data, people rather turn to ASCII NASA AMES for
time series and to HDF for the remaining (4 dimensional data sets, time
+ 4 space dim), at least in Europe.
At the same time, the modelers for aerosol and chemistry seem currently
to converge towards netCDF/CF convention.
This is no problem of having different formats, as long as clear and
consistent definitions exist. I would therefore like to encourage that
we try and link the variable names for aerosol and chemistry to these
formats in order to allow for easy conversion among formats.
I would be glad if you could comment on this issue.
Best regards,
Christiane
--
======================================================================
Christiane Textor
Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement
Unite Mixte de Recherche CEA-CNRS-UVSQ
LSCE, CEA Saclay
L'Orme des Merisiers, Bat. 701 Piece 3b
mailto: christiane.textor at lsce.ipsl.fr
Tel ++33 1 69 08 34 07 Fax ++33 1 69 08 34 07
F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex
FRANCE
GEOMON scientific project manager http://www.geomon.eu
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Received on Sun Nov 11 2007 - 10:21:56 GMT
