Dear CF World,
We are generating netCDF variables for a number of physical parameters,
the values of which are adjusted to be with respect to a climatological
baseline. So they are "anomaly" quantities in the sense specified in the
Guidelines for Construction of Standard Names.
We note further that CF standard names exist for just 4 anomaly-type
parameters (air pressure, air temperature, surface temperature, and
geopotential height).
So I could submit for approval new standard names for each of our
additional parameters (about 10 of them) by looking up the existing
standard name and appending the suffix "_anomaly". Before doing this,
however, it occurs to me that there are, presumably, a large number of
other parameters (with corresponding CF standard names) which might
conceivably receive the same treatment.
Yet is it not the case that the physical property described by the
'canonical' name and its associated 'anomaly' name is fundamentally the
same? All that's changed is the use of a different reference datum (i.e.
climatological mean instead of zero).
So rather than create "_anomaly" variants of potentially hundreds of CF
standard names, would an alternative solution be to add the term
"anomaly" to the list of standard name modifiers (cf. Appendix C in CF
spec)? In which case we'd be able to use names such as:
"air_temperature anomaly"
"lwe_precipitation_rate anomaly"
"air_pressure_at_sea_level anomaly"
and so on
I'm not familiar with the history of anomaly std names, so apologies if
I'm missing some nuance.
Regards,
Phil
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Received on Wed Apr 02 2008 - 08:28:13 BST
