Can someone provide the definitive site for the description of the "ASCII NASA AMES" convention, please? I wasn't sure if it described structure, semantics, or both.
Though this info may not be immediately valuable to atmospheric sciences, the observational community in oceanography uses CF standard variable framework quite a bit, as it is moderately extensive, extensible, true to science, and allows interoperability with many models. This despite the previously noted weakness of both netCDF and CF for observations -- a significant number of people in the oceanography community are participating in efforts to improve both of these standards for use in observations. (Actually, netCDF handles observations OK, but not everyone uses the same structural conventions, so interoperability isn't great yet.)
John
At 5:17 PM +0100 11/11/07, Christiane Textor wrote:
>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
--
----------
John Graybeal <mailto:graybeal at mbari.org> -- 831-775-1956
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Marine Metadata Initiative: http://marinemetadata.org || Shore Side Data System: http://www.mbari.org/ssds
Received on Sun Nov 11 2007 - 16:31:39 GMT
