Hi Reyna -
> Is this documented formally in the CF documentation?
Yes, it's listed in the 'canonical units' column of the various
practical salinity
variables.
The definition for sea_water_practical_salinity also states ' Officially
S_P is
dimensionless so that, while convenient, and while it is common
practice, it
is not officially sanctioned to say S_P = 35 psu'.
That's a rather odd statement, to my mind, considering that the units '.001'
is basically shorthand for 'parts per thousand' - PSU could be considered
shorthand for 'dimensionless' far more easily than .001 can be.
Cheers - Nan
On 5/22/15 1:06 PM, Reyna Jenkyns wrote:
> I'm interested in this topic since I didn't realize what had been discussed previously, and now I think we must be non-compliant as well. Is this documented formally in the CF documentation?
>
> Reyna Jenkyns | Data Stewardship Team Lead - Digital Infrastructure
> Ocean Networks Canada | T 250 853 3908 | oceannetworks.ca
> University of Victoria PO Box 1700 STN CSC 2300 McKenzie Avenue Victoria, BC V8W 2Y2
>
> ________________________________________
> From: CF-metadata <cf-metadata-bounces at cgd.ucar.edu> on behalf of Nan Galbraith <ngalbraith at whoi.edu>
> Sent: Friday, May 22, 2015 10:03 AM
> To: cf-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu; OceanSITES Data Management Team
> Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] Salinity units
>
> Hello all -
>
> It's been a long time, but is anyone interested in re-visiting the subject
> of units for practical salinity in CF?
>
> I was recently notified that my salinity data was likely to be
> overlooked by
> some users, because I'd used '1' as the units, not '.001'. Somehow, I'd
> forgotten the (long-ago) discussion on the CF list about salinity units.
>
> Some members of the OceanSITES project are interested in revising our
> format spec to encourage the use of '1' as an indication that salinity does
> not have units - but, of course, we'd mostly rather remain CF-compliant.
>
> Thanks for any feedback on this.
>
> Cheers - Nan
>
>
> On 6/17/09 2:48 AM, Lowry, Roy K wrote:
>
> > Dear All,
> >
> > During an exercise with Alison mapping the CF Standard Names to a
> > units vocabulary in the BODC vocabulary server I noticed that the
> > units for salinity were '1.00E-03', i.e. parts per thousand. My
> > understanding in that since the introduction of the Practical
> > Salinity Scale that salinity is dimensionless with units of '1'. Is
> > there agreement for our changing the units in the Standard Name
> > table?
> >
> > Cheers, Roy.
>
> --
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> CF-metadata mailing list
> CF-metadata at cgd.ucar.edu
> http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
>
--
*******************************************************
* Nan Galbraith Information Systems Specialist *
* Upper Ocean Processes Group Mail Stop 29 *
* Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution *
* Woods Hole, MA 02543 (508) 289-2444 *
*******************************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/pipermail/cf-metadata/attachments/20150522/91f304f9/attachment-0001.html>
Received on Fri May 22 2015 - 13:05:44 BST
