John Caron,
Well, the following data sets at ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/Datasets/:
coads cpc_us_precip interp_OLR kaplan_sst msu ncep ncep.pac.ocean
ncep.reanalysis noaa_hrc nodc.woa94 recon_reynolds_sst reynolds_sst
udel.airt.precip
seem to fit the bill that you describe, although it is definitely
for others to decided if the constitute "important holdings". They're
important to CDC, at least. ;) You should be able to find them via http
protocol, starting at:
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/PublicData/
They are also available via DODS, using URLs that start with:
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/nph-nc/Datasets/
Now, when we got started with our conventions, we felt that the
User's Guide's discussion of conventions was indeed ambiguous regarding
the type of the valid_range attribute, merely saying it needed to match
that of its data variable, without mentioning the complication that such
a variable would have two types (external/internal, AKA packed/unpacked).
We made the same call that was described earlier in the discussion, namely
that it should be more of a human readable concept, as our software blithely
used the missing_value attribute (in the external/packed type) to discern
the validity of a value. I recall hearing a couple of complaints about
our typing of the valid_range attribute. I doubt it prevented anyone from
making good use of our data, however. ;) I hope this is of some use in
the on-going discussion.
-Hoop
