Announcing the beta release of the "NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF)
Metadata Conventions."
Over the past 2 years there has been an effort to merge the GDT and NCAR
CSM conventions for climate and forecast netCDF metadata. Both of these
conventions were designed as extensions to the COARDS conventions. The
merged convention is simpler and emphasizes both COARDS conformance and
backwards compatibility.
The new convention is linked to Unidata's netCDF conventions page at
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/conventions.html. The
following is the abstract from the convention document:
This document describes the CF conventions for climate and forecast
metadata designed to promote the processing and sharing of files created
with the netCDF Application Programmer Interface [NetCDF]. The
conventions define metadata that provide a definitive description of what
the data in each variable represents, and of the spatial and temporal
properties of the data. This enables users of data from different sources
to decide which quantities are comparable, and facilitates building
applications with powerful extraction, regridding, and display
capabilities.
The CF conventions generalize and extend the COARDS conventions
[COARDS]. The extensions include metadata that provides a precise
definition of each variable via specification of a standard name,
describes the vertical locations corresponding to dimensionless vertical
coordinate values, and provides the spatial coordinates of
non-rectilinear gridded data. Since climate and forecast data are often
not simply representative of points in space/time, other extensions
provide for the description of coordinate intervals, multidimensional
cells and climatological time coordinates, and indicate how a data value
is representative of an interval or cell. This standard also relaxes the
COARDS constraints on dimension order and specifies methods for reducing
the size of datasets.
We invite comments from the community on this beta release.
Brian Eaton, NCAR
Jonathan Gregory, Hadley Centre, UK Met Office
Bob Drach, PCMDI, LLNL
Karl Taylor, PCMDI, LLNL
Steve Hankin, PMEL, NOAA
