Well I said I had a few things I'd like to dicuss so here's the second
item.
Is it possible and/or permitted in netCDF to have multidimensional
coordinate variables and attributes?
Here are two examples of what I'm talking about. First lets say I've
divided up the globe into 90 regions each having the same amount of elements
in the lat direction and the lon direction. The shape of the variable would
thus be (90,36,72) and the dimension names would be (region,lat,lon).
Now here is what I'm getting at. The lat and lon coordinates are different
for each region. A one dimensional coordinate variable for the dimensions
lat and lon will not cut it. However, a two dimensional one would with a shape
of (90,36) for lat and (90,72) for lon, would work. I haven't ever seen
any files with this organization. Is this legal?
The second example concerns attributes. Lets say I have a 3D array and rather
than store the variable attributes min and max for the whole array. I'd like to
have a variable attribute that stores an array of mins and maxs for individual
2D slices. Is this resonable and legal? How are the dimensions of attributes
stored? The attribute section of the netCDF guide shows attributes only having
a type and a length, no dimensions.
-ethan
