[CF-metadata] CF-1.6 Conformance Requirements/Recommendations

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2012 17:45:01 +0100

Dear Karl

I am not quite sure if I have understood you. I have changed ticket 85 to
propose the following for sect 9.6:

Wherever there are unused elements in data storage, the data variable and
all its auxiliary coordinate variables (spatial and time) must contain missing
values. This situation may arise for the incomplete multidimensional array
representation, and in any representation if the instance dimension is set to
a larger size than the number of features currently stored. Data variables
should (as usual) also contain missing values to indicate when there is no
valid data available for the element, although the coordinates are valid.

I hope that addresses one of your points. Yes, this para applies only to
discrete sampling geometries (sect 9). This para is about "padding" data
variables in discrete sampling geometries with unused elements.

The rest of the discussion on this email thread has been about auxiliary
coordinate variables in general, not sect 9 in particular. We have agreed
to allow missing data in aux coord vars, but we don't expect that generic
applications will use the data where the aux coord vars are missing data.

If you don't think this is right, please could you add to ticket 85?

Best wishes

Jonathan
Received on Tue Apr 03 2012 - 10:45:01 BST