Nan - Don't get me wrong? I agree with what you have said and the practical point of view, and was seriously just wondering what a statistician would say about this. And of course most (?) or at least many instruments are not directly measuring the thing they are reporting or the thing that is being recorded in the netCDF file? e.g., conductivity is measured not salinity. Pressure not depth?. and so on.
Ken
On Mar 29, 2013, at 9:57 AM, Nan Galbraith <ngalbraith at whoi.edu> wrote:
> I don't want to belabor this point, but from the practical point of view of someone
> who uses and generates data, which I think is fairly representative of this group, a
> mean is a representation of a geophysical property, and a stdev is not.
>
> We collect in situ data, and I know that MANY of our instruments output the mean
> of several measurements, few do single spot samples. It would surprise me to hear
> anyone claim that these data sets do not represent geophysical quantities.
>
> Again, I'm just suggesting that the rules for standard name modifiers might be
> tweaked to encourage user-friendly labeling of data. I suspect that most data
> publishers are already taking care not to share data that's labeled in a CF-compliant
> but misleading way.
>
> Regards - Nan
>
>
> On 3/29/13 9:08 AM, Kenneth S. Casey - NOAA Federal wrote:
>> Nan - your statement below has me wondering about what a statistician would say. Would they say: A "mean" is still a statistical concept, and can not be measured. It can only be computed, statistically, as sum/N. In that sense, it is not really any different that standard deviation? the mean is where the distribution is centered, and the standard deviation is the width of that distribution. Neither is a discrete measurement and only make sense as part of a distribution. But I am not a statistician so I really do wonder what one would say?.
>>
>> -Ken
>>
>> On Mar 27, 2013, at 4:23 PM, Nan Galbraith <ngalbraith at whoi.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> I don't think the standard deviation of the temperature of sea water is really a
>>> geophysical property; it's a mathematical concept, while a temperature value
>>> represented as a mean is still a temperature.
>>
>
>
> --
> *******************************************************
> * Nan Galbraith Information Systems Specialist *
> * Upper Ocean Processes Group Mail Stop 29 *
> * Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution *
> * Woods Hole, MA 02543 (508) 289-2444 *
> *******************************************************
>
>
Kenneth S. Casey, Ph.D.
Technical Director
NOAA National Oceanographic Data Center
1315 East-West Highway
Silver Spring MD 20910
301-713-3272 x133
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov
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Received on Fri Mar 29 2013 - 11:45:09 GMT
