Jonathan,
That sounds great! I was thinking there needed to be some way to capture the 42% figure.
So, to sum up, the standard name and definition would be:
surface_snow_cover_binary_mask: The value is 1 where the snow cover area fraction is greater than a threshold, and 0 elsewhere. The threshold must be specified by associating a scalar coordinate variable with the data variable and giving the scalar coordinate variable a standard name of surface_snow_area_fraction. The value of the scalar coordinate variable is the threshold value.
Does that look/sound right?
Grace and peace,
Jim
Jim Biard
Research Scholar
Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites
Remote Sensing and Applications Division
National Climatic Data Center
151 Patton Ave, Asheville, NC 28801-5001
jim.biard at noaa.gov
828-271-4900
On Sep 5, 2012, at 1:34 PM, Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory at reading.ac.uk> wrote:
> Dear Jim
>
>> I'd like to propose the new standard name "snow_cover_binary_mask". There is a NOAA snow coverage extent product that is being put into netCDF format. The product is derived from the IMS Daily Northern Hemisphere Snow & Ice Analysis. It is a grid in which cells are marked as snow-covered or not snow-covered. The GCMD already has the keywords "Cryosphere > Snow/Ice > Snow Cover" and "Terrestrial Hydrosphere > Snow/Ice > Snow Cover", which are applied to the source product.
>
> This idea seems fine to me. However, existing names for snow cover refer to
> it as surface_snow, so I would suggest surface_snow_binary_mask instead.
>
>> In this particular product, grid cells are marked as snow-covered when > 42% of the cell indicates the presence of snow.
>
> For generality and to make the data self-describing, I would suggest that the
> definition of snow_cover_binary_mask should require that the data variable has
> coordinate variable or a scalar coordinate variable of
> surface_snow_area_fraction (42% in your case) to specify the threshold. That
> is an existing standard_name.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Jonathan
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Received on Wed Sep 05 2012 - 12:43:58 BST
