NOTE: The cf-satellite mailing list is no longer active. The list archives are made available for historical reasons.
Hi.I'm working on the NOAA NCDC CDR program, and my first task is to develop a production system for creating a lower-level product than the one you are describing for this prototype. The product will be the NPP VIIRS instrument data, uncompressed and organized according to resolution and band, along with the ephemeris and attitude data needed to do geolocation. There will be no conversion to engineering or science units, and no geolocation of the pixels. (We plan on doing sufficient geolocation to identify the swath envelope.) We are planning on storing this data in netCDF-4 format. This product will then be used to produce higher-level products, and will be archived for later use (as an aid to reprocessing higher-level products with modified algorithms or calibration data, for example).
While such a data product won't be directly usable in visualization packages and such, I would prefer to organize the data in a way that comes as close as possible to matching existing conventions. Since we will not have physical units to associate with any dimensions other than band and time, I'm wondering what is the best approach to take. Is this level of product too basic to warrant a convention? Do you think the cf-satellite convention should include guidelines for this level of data? I'd appreciate any guidance on how to tackle this.
In addition, there are a number of look-up tables that are used in converting this "raw" data to engineering and science units. Many of these look-up tables have input indices larger than 1 byte in size. Many of these are, again, not something standardized software packages will likely use, and we are presently leaning towards the idea of creating attributes in the product files that would provide unique references to files containing the data for the look-up tables. I would also appreciate any guidance on this topic that people would be willing to provide.
Lastly (and maybe this should have come first!), if you don't think this is the correct forum for these questions, please direct me to what you feel is the proper forum. I'm new to working with netCDF, and I need all the help I can get.
Grace and peace, Jim Biard -- Jim Biard Government Contractor, STG Inc. Remote Sensing and Applications Division (RSAD) National Climatic Data Center 151 Patton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801-5001 jim.biard@xxxxxxxx 828-257-3006
cf-satellite archives: