[CF-metadata] water level with/without datum

From: Seth McGinnis <mcginnis>
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:50:59 -0700

>Therefore I think we have to decide what to call the new names. Roy suggested
>water body. As I've said before, I would prefer sea/lake/river_water (or with
>some other punctuation) to water_body_water, because sea/lake/river_water is
>more self-explanatory, and the repetition of "water" in water_body_water is
>clumsy and possibly confusing. I can imagine someone not being sure how to
>parse "water body water temperature" when they first come across it.


Instead of a prefix modifer, how about adding _body as a postfix
modifier?

So you could have sea_water_temperature for oceans and
water_body_temperature for oceans, rivers, lakes, and other
significant accumulations of liquid water.

Cheers,

----
Seth McGinnis
NARCCAP Data Manager
ISSE / ISP / IMAGe / CISL / NCAR
----
(P.S.: Observation/tangent: It seems like this conundrum may be arising in
part because the day-to-day meaning of the term "water" -- liquid H2O
-- is at odds with the definition given in the standard name
guidelines of "water in all phases if not otherwise qualified".  Were
there a blank slate, I would suggest using the unqualified term to
mean "liquid water", in better alignment with its commonsense meaning,
and coming up with a new term for the more restricted contexts where
one needs to refer to all three phases.  How frequently in current
usage does the "all phases" sense differ fom the usual sense? Would it
be worth considering a switch?  That would be an alternate way around
the issue of generic water bodies.)

Received on Fri Feb 26 2010 - 20:50:59 GMT