[CF-metadata] New UDUnits units for information: "byte" and "octet"

From: Jonathan Gregory <j.m.gregory>
Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 10:29:39 +0000

Dear all

I agree with Steve and Roy about this:

> > Now UDUnits has "molecule" and "byte". They (Steve)
> > are receptive to well-justified proposals, so do not feel daunted
> > in transmitting to them the suggestion for "photon".
>
> Adding such units is the wrong way to go about solving the problem of
> adding quantity-semantics to data values. It would be much better to have
> the names of the variables be things like
>
> "number_of_tents"
> "number_of_clouds"
etc.
>
> and whose units were "1" than to try to incorporate such semantic
> information into a unit

That is exactly what the CF standard says. From Sect 3.1 on "Units":

"Descriptive information about dimensionless quantities, such as sea-ice
concentration, cloud fraction, probability, etc., should be given in the
long_name or standard_name attributes rather than the units."

Best wishes

Jonathan
Received on Fri Nov 28 2014 - 03:29:39 GMT