[CF-metadata] standard way to store lookuptables

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 17:17:01 +0100

Dear Andrea

I think some of your conversation has been off the list, so I'm not sure
exactly what has been said. Anyway, here are some remarks.

> >? If so these would be easily encoded using netCDF
> > variables that all depend upon a dimension "numberOfSoilTypes".? Having said
> > this I'd add that while this is a natural encoding in netCDF there is no
> > explicit convention for it.

It would be fine in CF to have a data variable e.g. of hydraulic conductivity
with a dimension for soiltypes. This data variable could have a string-valued
auxiliary coordinate variable to identify the soil types by name. This idea
is described in CF 6.1.

In your lat-lon field which gives the geographical
distribution of soil types, you can use some encoding e.g. as integers,
and attach flag_values and flag_meanings attributes to give the translation
of these integers into soil type names. This is in CF 3.5.

There is an example of precipitation timeseries from stations in CF 5.4.
Again, they could be given names, like in CF 6.1.

Cheers

Jonathan
Received on Fri Oct 02 2009 - 10:17:01 BST