Seth,
On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 5:04 PM, Seth McGinnis <mcginnis at ucar.edu> wrote:
> Hi Ellyn,
>
> According to CF Trac Ticket #31 (slated for inclusion in the update to CF 1.7),
> the way to cache minimum & maximum values in metadata is to use an attribute
> named "actual_range" and store them as a pair.
>
> (I kind of think this is a bad idea, and wish that ticket was still open. I
> missed this discussion when it happened, but my experience with actual_max type
> attributes in practice has convinced me that it's SO easy for them to become
> inconsistent that it would really be better not to include them at all.
Yes, but...
> Computing the min & max on the fly is cheap, and approximating it is even
> cheaper, so why introduce the uncertainty?
... but computing min & max on the fly can also be very expensive.
We have aggregated model output datasets where each variable is more
than 1TB!
-Rich
--
Dr. Richard P. Signell (508) 457-2229
USGS, 384 Woods Hole Rd.
Woods Hole, MA 02543-1598
Received on Thu May 23 2013 - 05:34:57 BST
