[CF-metadata] FW: realization | x of n

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 16:40:48 +0000

Dear Mark

> Please may people raise any further concerns about a new standard name:
> number_of_realizations
> with a canonical unit of
> ''
> and a description of
> The number of member realizations within a given ensemble.

My concern is probably the same one as before. Sorry about that. Does this
mean the number of members the ensemble has got? If it does, why does it differ
from the ensemble dimension? If the ensemble dimension has been collapsed to
size 1, we could record this in cell_methods. Maybe you are dealing with an
intermediate case, having a subset of the ensemble members, and you want to
record how many there originally were in total. Is this a common use case?
It seems rather surprising to me. But I'm not sure that's what you mean.

> This name enables a single member from an ensemble to explicitly be labelled, e.g.
> seven_of_nine
> which is often required in operational forecasting.

But this seems different. It's not the number of members there are, but the
ordinal number (7) of this particular member. Why can't that be recorded in a
variable with the existing standard_name of realization?

Cheers

Jonathan
Received on Thu Oct 30 2014 - 10:40:48 GMT