Dear Mark and Thomas
I also think that we would do better to keep the current arrangement of
standard_names with the umbrella variable as an extra grouping. As you may
remember, the question of whether CF standard names could be decomposed into
separate words or atts has been discussed several times. My own view is that
this would be very difficult and has disadvantages as well as advantages.
Instead, I think would be better to make it easier to construct and propose
new names systematically. A couple of years ago I did a fair amount of work
on that, which I have not brought up to date, but it could be revisited if
you think it is promising. For instance, please have a look at
http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~jonathan/CF_metadata/14.1
Since some of the concern is about backward compatibility, perhaps we could
address Mark's need by defining new standard names for his more general
purpose, for example x_or_eastward_wind, thus not redefining the existing ones.
As a digression, we could also take the opportunity to make them more
systematic. With hindsight, it seems a mistake to me that we chose to have
e.g. eastward_sea_ice_velocity and sea_ice_x_velocity, with the component in
a different place. The reason was that the meaning of an x_ prefix to a long
standard name might not be obvious. Perhaps xward_sea_ice_velocity would be
better, and eastward_sea_ice_velocity and eastward_or_xward_sea_ice_velocity.
Best wishes
Jonathan
Received on Wed May 16 2012 - 14:56:39 BST
