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John:
On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 9:51 AM, John Caron <caron@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Another way to say the same thing: A coordinate variable must have values
> that are a "sampling" along a continuous domain. One sees this violated in
> the poorly designed AWIPS netcdf files, eg where all "temperature" values
> are crammed into one variable, and the coordinate values have both pressure
> and height and potential temperature, etc.
Is it possible (practical) to define a simple "index" as a coordinate
variable? What I'm thinking here is that we could define some
coordinate axis types like "wavelength", etc., but would also need
something that is just a simple index with a well-known attribute that
could be easily recognized. In this "simple index" case, the data
provider would have to supply other variables, dimensioned by "band"
(for example) that would further describe the meaning of these
indecies (for example: wavelength(band) would contain the central
wavelength value).
If this reasonable, then I could see us creating a few new coordinate
axis names ("wavelength", "wavenumber") along with this simple index
(name to be determined), and then start defining some standard_names
for the ancillary metadata as well.
tom
--
Tom Whittaker
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Space Science & Engineering Center (SSEC)
Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS)
1225 W. Dayton Street
Madison, WI 53706 USA
ph: +1 608 262 2759
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