The draft document written by Russ Rew and Steve Emmerson contains, I believe, a very useful set of operators (netcdf file(s) in, netcdf file out) and utilities (netcdf file(s) in, other file out). One concept used in this draft is that of coordinate variables "A coordinate variable is a one-dimensional variable having the same name as its dimension." For dimensions corresponding to latitude or longitude, this definition is quite reasonable. An NCFLOAT singly dimensioned variable does the job quite nicely. Similarly, we find the definition fine for pressure. The one dimension which we find doesn't easily correspond to a singly subscripted variable (byte, character, short, long, float, and double) is time. For our purposes, we like to assure millisecond resolution in this variable. In addition, we wish to be able to specify times over many centuries. It may not be important to take a time difference over a century to the nearest millisecond, but it may be convenient to have single time scale and be able to extract a given entry with data of such precision. Double precision numbers cannot assure exact millisecond resolution. They might be made to work with a time offset defined within the dataset, but this too is not part of the netcdf standard nor the assumptions built into these proposed operators/utilities. We have decided to use two integers for time. The first is the Julian day (jan 1, 1992 = 2448623), the second is the millisecond of day. By standardizing on a particular time scheme like this, large range and great precision can both be attained. In addition, we can standardize plotting routines to get axes for the appropriate time period. How do other people deal with time? Is it possible and/or reasonable to try to generalize the concept of a one-dimensional coordinate variable to a two or N dimensional quantity? Dan Packman pack@ncar.ucar.edu