This issue has broadened from Roy's initial topic of a term for
water column, and now includes water bodies and water itself.
It seems like it would not be too difficult to use water_column to
indicate a mass of water that's limited in x-y and includes the full
depth, and water_body to indicate a river, lake, ocean, or other.
It might be worthwhile to consider replacing the term "sea_water" with
"water" in the standard name list, with sea_water aliased for backwards
compatibility. This seems much more useful than adding *a lot* of new
terms to the parameter list, and the addition of a water_body vocabulary
would take care of the distinction; the default would be ocean for files
that
don't include a water_body, also for backwards compatibility.
Classifying data from coastal estuaries makes it convenient to have
more general terms - neither sea_water, river_water, or lake_water
would be exactly correct. There are too many shades of gray in water
body types and too many parameters involved to create standard names
for them all. There is an existing GCMD keyword list - sorry, I can't find
it on their site this morning - for "Bodies Of Water" types.
Cheers - Nan
> > I would welcome CF standard names embracing the concept of 'water column'
> > under any label as it would firm up the mappings between the BODC
> > vocabularies being used by SeaDataNet and CF (although it would weaken
> > mappings between CF and GCMD who clearly differentiate between salt and
> > fresh water). However, although using the word 'sea' for this concept
> > would overcome legacy issues I worry about the potential for confusion.
> Yes, I think "hydrosphere" would be a possible word to use when we need to
> refer to properties of the whole mass of water, in the context where we
> currently use "ocean" e.g. for large-scale transports. We also need a word
> for the material, which we call sea_water, to refer to its properties such
> as salinity, density, velocity and so on. Is there a word which means ocean,
> sea, lake or river? In any language?
>
>> I fear this is a hopeless quest, which is why I suggested defining "sea" to
>> include lake and river in the context of CF standard names.
>>
>
> A solution which would work, but I think would be ugly, would be to define
> aliases with "lake_water" and "river_water" for all names containing
> "sea_water" so they could be used with equivalent meaning. Thus, you could
> use "river_water" to describe properties of water in the Pacific Ocean, and
> "sea_water" for the Thames, and that could be confusing as well, but it would
> allow people to use "sea", "lake" and "river" when appropriate.
>
> This would possibly be an abuse of aliases, which we introduced to allow us
> to correct mistakes, in effect i.e. when we subsequently decided names were
> wrong in some way, so that data which used superseded names was still valid.
> The purpose of standard names is to be standard! To introduce synonyms
> undermines that aim. Hence I'm not sure if it's a good idea, although it would
> get round this problem. Any views?
>
--
*******************************************************
* Nan Galbraith (508) 289-2444 *
* Upper Ocean Processes Group Mail Stop 29 *
* Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution *
* Woods Hole, MA 02543 *
*******************************************************
Received on Tue Feb 05 2008 - 08:44:03 GMT
