[CF-metadata] Question on WKT representation of CRS (Bentley, Philip)

From: Seth McGinnis <mcginnis>
Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:49:47 -0600

On Tue, 4 Oct 2011 15:28:15 +0100
 Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory at reading.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>The CF convention as it stands can say a lot less, but it does look more
>self-explanatory to me! The meaning of the WKT is not clear to me. I'm quite
>uneasy about importing a convention into CF which produces opaque metadata
>like this, even though it is no doubt machine-readable.

I'm uneasy about opaque metadata, too, especially when it comes
to model output. (I'm agnostic about its use for observational
data, or as an optional add-on.)

Pragmatically, I think modelers could be asked to add some more
parameters to their projection metadata, things like 'datum =
"WGS84"' or 'ellipsoid = "spherical"', and that would be
successful. I think if they were asked to add something long and
mysterious like WKT, there would be a lot of model output with
metadata that's either non-conformant or flat-out wrong.

Another consideration, mentioned in a previous thread about
datums, is that the reality of atmospheric models is they
generally run on a spherical earth but use forcings taken from
WGS84 locations without any transformation. So the datum is
somewhat ill-defined in the first place. Would having WKT
available for these cases imply a misleading level of
specificity?

Cheers,

--Seth
Received on Tue Oct 04 2011 - 16:49:47 BST