[CF-metadata] standard names for variables in raw engineering units

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:02:49 +0100

Dear Nan et al.

A possible way to deal with raw data would be to regard it as a kind of
ancillary data and use a standard name modifier to indicate it (CF 3.3
and appendix C) e.g. raw_data. In your case the standard_name attribute would
then contain "rainfall_rate raw_data". In Appendix C we could specify that
the units are 1 i.e. dimensionless if there is a raw_data modifier. The
definition of the modifier would clarify that there is no standard for how
the raw data is to be converted to the geophysical quantity, but you could
record some information about that in the dataset in a comment.

This would work if there is a one-to-one correspondence between raw data and
geophysical quantity. It has been commented that some raw datasets might be
be the basis of more than one geophysical quantity. Likewise, I expect that
some geophysical quantities depend more than one raw dataset. I think that
if it's raw data which can be described more precisely as being the output of
a particular kind of sensor, and it is in physical units, we should give it
its own standard name; in such cases, the raw data would have more of a
standard meaning, and standard algorithms could be applied to derive geo-
physical quantities from it, I imagine. However, the above approach might be
suitable for your unstandardised raw data. What do you think? If it would be
a useful way forward, it would need to be proposed on trac as a modification
to the CF standard.

Best wishes

Jonathan
Received on Fri Apr 10 2009 - 02:02:49 BST