I believe this is correct; a 'time' has to be a numeric value.
What about using 'date' for string-valued times? That was my homebrew solution
when I was considering a similar problem.
(Note that string data is a big pain to deal with in NetCDF-3, because you're
limited to fixed-length character arrays. You need to use NetCDF-4 / HDF5 to
get Strings as a data type.)
Cheers,
--Seth
On Tue, 19 Oct 2010 09:21:25 -0400
Aleksandar Jelenak <Aleksandar.Jelenak at noaa.gov> wrote:
>Dear Olivier,
>
>Aleksandar Jelenak wrote on 10/19/10 7:58 AM:
>> Lauret Olivier wrote on 10/18/10 10:51 AM:
>>> ? Are you sure you need a standard name such as "time_label_iso8601"?
>>> I mean: isn't it possible to use "time" standard name instead? (And
>>> put somewhere that it is ISO 8601 compliant information, like in
>>> 'long name' attribute)
>>
>> It is possible and I can think of several alternative ways of doing that
>> ('comments' variable attribute?). I am not sure though if it would be
>> appropriate to use the standard name associated with numerical time data.
>
>Actually, I don't think it is possible to use 'time' standard name in such
>cases. If I correctly interpret CF rules for using standard names, 'time' data
>can be only in the physically-equivalent units to "seconds". Strings, being
>dimensionless, do not qualify.
>
> -Aleksandar
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Received on Tue Oct 19 2010 - 08:27:10 BST
