[CF-metadata] GIS versus CF conventions

[John Caron]

Hi,

The issue of representing GIS information has come up again in the
context of development of a WCS server for netCDF data (on the
galeon at unidata.ucar.edu mailing list).  The particular issue is how to
avoid this situation for a Web Coverage Service:

   ... roughly 16/17ths of the resulting netCDF file is geolocation
   information.  For each pixel there are two double precision location
   values ( lat and lon) for 1 byte of actual image payload.  Is there
   any way of requesting the image data from the server without the
   geolocation lat/lon arrays?

There is a desire to avoid storing a redundant lat/lon grid of doubles
in addition to parameters in the file that are already sufficient for
georeferencing.  This would require a change to the CF conventions.

This issue has been raised before, but I'm not sure we had such a good
example of the need for a better solution than the current CF
conventions provide.

John