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Tom and other cf-satelliters, > Each "band" may have its own "unit" or even scale and offset. > Presently, there are no provisions for a "dimensioned attribute"; I > supposed these attributes could be specified as variables, but I worry > about applications trying to connect them (or the library, in the case > of scaling and NetCDF-Java). I think variables would be adequate for this. What connects them to the bands is the shared band dimension. > I'm hoping the NetCDF developers have thought about this...and can > steer us a bit into what makes sense..... Attributes can also have multiple values, but not using one of the shared dimensions that variables use to specify shapes and shared grids. In netCDF-3, multiple attribute values are used to implement strings, since the NC_CHAR primitive type is only a single character. In the enhanced netCDF-4 data model, strings are a primitive type, so an attribute may have as values multiple strings of different lengths. This could also be provided in the netCDF-3 data model with a convention for how to delimit multiple string values in a single netCDF-3 text attribute. Since netCDF-3 attributes have a length, the null character could be used for this purpose, but CF conventions tend to just use a space character to delimit multiple strings such as names in a single text attribute. For example, see the CF attributes for coordinates, bounds, cell_measures, cell_methods, and formula_terms. --Russ
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