[CF-metadata] stations and trajectories

[John Caron]

Hi Magnus:

Magnus Hagdorn wrote:

>On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 17:22 -0700, John Caron wrote:
>
>  
>
>>thanks, i hadnt seen that section before in this context.
>>
>>i see that you have a string valued coordinate variable. Is the 
>>intention that be a unique identifier ?
>>
>>In the case im trying to deal with, we have a unique id, a description 
>>and optionally a wmo id associated with each station. In general, one 
>>could have arbitrary information you want to associate with each station.
>>
>>    
>>
>I don't think that netCDF is a particularily good format for storing
>time series. netCDF is designed for gridded data. I think the problem
>with time series is that there is not necessarily a shared time
>coordinate. 
>
Yes, I agree that the usual shared time coordinate variable (supposed to 
be monotonic etc) is not quite the right way to do time series of 
observations, when there are multiple stations, trajectories, etc.

I have been thinking about how to use netcdf files effectively for 
"observation datasets", as opposed to gridded data, and ive written some 
ideas here:

  
http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/netcdf-java/formats/RecordsInNetcdf3.html

Any feedback from this group or beyond would be welcome.