Climate and Forecast (CF) metadata conventions

• To: <netcdfgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: Climate and Forecast (CF) metadata conventions
• From: Brian Eaton <eaton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 10:32:21 -0600 (MDT)

Announcing the beta release of the "NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF)
Metadata Conventions."

Over the past 2 years there has been an effort to merge the GDT and NCAR
CSM conventions for climate and forecast netCDF metadata.  Both of these
conventions were designed as extensions to the COARDS conventions.  The
merged convention is simpler and emphasizes both COARDS conformance and
backwards compatibility.

The new convention is linked to Unidata's netCDF conventions page at
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/conventions.html.  The
following is the abstract from the convention document:

  This document describes the CF conventions for climate and forecast
  metadata designed to promote the processing and sharing of files created
  with the netCDF Application Programmer Interface [NetCDF]. The
  conventions define metadata that provide a definitive description of what
  the data in each variable represents, and of the spatial and temporal
  properties of the data. This enables users of data from different sources
  to decide which quantities are comparable, and facilitates building
  applications with powerful extraction, regridding, and display
  capabilities.

  The CF conventions generalize and extend the COARDS conventions
  [COARDS]. The extensions include metadata that provides a precise
  definition of each variable via specification of a standard name,
  describes the vertical locations corresponding to dimensionless vertical
  coordinate values, and provides the spatial coordinates of
  non-rectilinear gridded data. Since climate and forecast data are often
  not simply representative of points in space/time, other extensions
  provide for the description of coordinate intervals, multidimensional
  cells and climatological time coordinates, and indicate how a data value
  is representative of an interval or cell. This standard also relaxes the
  COARDS constraints on dimension order and specifies methods for reducing
  the size of datasets.

We invite comments from the community on this beta release.

Brian Eaton, NCAR
Jonathan Gregory, Hadley Centre, UK Met Office
Bob Drach, PCMDI, LLNL
Karl Taylor, PCMDI, LLNL
Steve Hankin, PMEL, NOAA