IDV & the "explicit_field" vertical coordinate

• To: idvusers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Subject: IDV & the "explicit_field" vertical coordinate
• From: "Rich Signell" <rsignell@xxxxxxxx>
• Date: Fri, 9 Feb 2007 15:13:40 -0500

IDV gurus,

I stumbled across this page of NetCDF-Java supported Standard
Coordinate Transforms:

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf-java/reference/StandardCoordinateTransforms.html

and was surprised (and pleased) to see that in addition to several CF
convention vertical coordinates, there was an additional non-CF
compliant "explicit_field" coordinate.

It looks like this allows one to supply the 3D or 4D field of z
positions in the case that the CF conventions don't have your favorite
flavor of vertical coordinate.   That would be great.

So my questions are:

1) Does IDV work with vertical coordinates specified using "explicit_field"?

2) Assuming the answer is "yes", do you have an example netcdf file
using this "explicit_field" that we could look at?   It's not clear to
me exactly what the file should look like, and of course the CF
checker won't help us this time!

Thanks,
Rich

--
Dr. Richard P. Signell   (508) 457-2229
USGS, 384 Woods Hole Rd.
Woods Hole, MA 02543-1598