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NOTICE: This version of the NSF Unidata web site (archive.unidata.ucar.edu) is no longer being updated.
Current content can be found at unidata.ucar.edu.
To learn about what's going on, see About the Archive Site.
Hi Cathy: On 2/27/2012 4:36 PM, Cathy Smith wrote:
John I believe users read from netCDF vs grib files both because reading from grib is not easy and because netCDF provides metadata that is human readable. Changing variable names to VAR__.... is not human readable. Users doing a ncdump would be forced to read through non-standard metadata attributes to see what the variable was (or refer to grib tables which would be different for grib1 vs grib2).
A human readable name will be in the standard attribute "long_name" for each variable. Also, the NCEP "short name" is now also in the variable attributes when its available.
These grib tables wouldn't necessarily be handy to most users. Users who have scripts now to get data would have to change their scripts in a way that isn't straightforward and also (to me) seems more subject to typos and similar errors.
Yes, scripts will have to be changed (once).
While I see that for some developers, the change might make things easier, it would not be for all developers and it certainly would not for most scientists and researchers using TDS files directly. They don't have the time or patience to have to look these things up when they just want to know about the contents of a file quickly, which IS possible now via TDS.
Really, this isnt about who is convenienced. Its about very deep design differences between GRIB and netCDF that make this a hard, perhaps impossible, thing to do well. The current scheme doesnt work, and about 20% of NCEP/IDD names are simply wrong, and an unknown percentage of non-NCEP names are wrong. So some things must break. Following the advice to never waste a really bad crisis, the thinking is to break them all, but only once.
John
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