Dear John
Thanks for your email. CF standard names are designed with the intention of
being self-explanatory, so it would be better to have a longer phrase which
describes what the quantity is in physical terms. The standard_name table
should give some ideas about how to do that. I notice that there is an existing
standard_name of surface_backwards_scattering_coefficient_of_radar_wave. Is
that related to this quantity perhaps?
Cheers
Jonathan
> Radar Scatterometers, such as QuikSCAT, are used to measure the winds over the oceans, Arctic and Antarctic ice age, track icebergs, among other things by measuring a value called sigma naught, also known in the radar community as the normalized radar cross-section or backscatter coefficient. Due to a significant effort to reprocess multiple sigma naught datasets to netCDF format, which shall be hosted at the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov<http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/>) for public distribution, I propose the following standard_name definition be added to the CF standard name:
>
> standard_name:
> sigma_naught
>
> Definition:
> sigma_naught refers to the normalized radar cross section, also known in the microwave remote sensing community as the backscatter coefficient.
>
> Canonical Units:
> dB
>
>
> Sincerely,
> John Niedfeldt
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----- End forwarded message -----
Received on Mon May 19 2014 - 09:46:01 BST
