[CF-metadata] Representing statistics in CF

From: Jon Blower <j.d.blower>
Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2017 15:09:58 +0000

Dear Jonathan,

Many thanks for your reply. Looks like my case 2 (statistics over time) is pretty straightforward. But I?m afraid I don?t quite understand your suggestion for case 1 (ensemble statistics):

? You can do this with cell_methods in exactly the same way, "e: mean" and "e: standard_deviation" where e is the ensemble dimension. If you don't have an ensemble dimension, you could put "realization: mean" and "realization: standard_deviation", since "realization" is a standard_name for ensemble member designators.

In our case we don?t have an ensemble dimension (the individual realizations will be in different files). So I guess we are looking at your second suggestion. Could you help me understand the usage of ?realization? please?

From the standard name table I can see that ?realization? is intended to label a dimension. Given that each realization will be in a different file, does this mean that each file will have a ?realization? dimension, whose corresponding coordinate variable contains a single value (the realization label)?

In this case, do the variables containing the ensemble mean and spread go in new files? I assume so, but then how do we associate the ?realization? in the cell_methods of the statistical variables with the ?realization? dimension of the individual files? (And, for that matter, is there a way of expressing that the individual realization files all belong to the same ?dataset??)

Best wishes,
Jon
Received on Fri Apr 28 2017 - 09:09:58 BST