Thank you for your thoughts on this David, Karl, and Jim.
David, I concur with you.
Karl, rest assured we are talking about adding cell_methods to _both_
the variable and its coordinate, not the coordinate instead of the
variable.
Jim, you seem to view coordinates as abstract mathematical axes while
I prefer their geophysical meaning. With respect to this discussion
I see time similarly to other coordinates like lat, lon, lev.
For example, when NCO averages a spatiotemporal region I want users to
know that the scalar (or size 1 array) values of time, lat, and lon
values in the output represent averages over the original input region
and cell_methods seems to be the natural way to do this.
Since CF seems to allow cell_methods on coordinates, NCO will continue
its current behavior. I hope the NERC CF checker starts to allow
this behavior (the Decker/Schultz cfchecker always has).
Best,
Charlie
p.s. thank you! to whomever fixed the archive URL issue
--
Charlie Zender, Earth System Sci. & Computer Sci.
University of California, Irvine 949-891-2429 )'(
Received on Tue Jun 02 2015 - 15:15:16 BST
