[CF-metadata] Conventions for a network of velocity sensors

From: Ateljevich, Eli <eli>
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2011 23:22:16 -0800

Hi, I am modeling the San Francisco Bay-Delta an estuary with several tributaries including the Sacramento River, San Joaquin River and numerous smaller streams. The boundary data are time series of cross-sectional velocity profiles across each channel. The cross-sections for different sensors are different and each cross-section contains numerous points.
I would like to retain the information about which velocities come from which sensors, and also add some attributes about the sensors. Can anyone comment on which of these possibilities is best:
1. Each sensor is an independent file. Then the variable would be water_velocity_x and _y, the transect locations would be included as a coordinate and the sensor station name such as sacramento_rsac075 would be an attribute. It is unclear to me that there is a standard nomenclature for the sensor name.
2. Each variable is a sensor station-variable pair: sacramento_rsac075_velocity. I don't see anything that looks like this in the CF examples, but the standard does not address variable names. I would use an attribute to identify the sensor name redundantly, and again I am not clear if there is a standard for this. The hitch seems to be that each station would have a different set of cross-section locations so the file would have a location coordinate for each sensor.
3.The data could be velocity(time,station). The "station" coordinate would be associated with lat, long and sensor names. This lumps all the data in one variable. The sensor used for each data point can be identified, but there is no clear slot for sensor metadata.
Thanks,
Eli
Received on Wed Feb 09 2011 - 00:22:16 GMT