[CF-metadata] standard name proposal for CCMVal - burden

Jonathan Gregory j.m.gregory at reading.ac.uk
Tue Jan 29 01:17:51 MST 2008


Dear Christiane and Martin

> In addition, the word burden evokes the idea of mass
I agree, and that's why I wasn't keen on it too, because we might wish to use
this term for non-massive things in the atmosphere, for instance the integral
of atmos energy content (J), and it would not be natural to call that an
"energy burden", I feel.

Your suggestion of "total" is a possibility. To keep the notion of "total"
with "atmosphere" I would prefer atmosphere_total_moles_of_X. But perhaps
we can omit the "total" and say simply atmosphere_moles_of_X? It would be
fairly natural to say likewise atmosphere_mass_of_X (kg), I think (although
in English "the atmospheric mass" or "the atmosphere's mass" would perhaps
be more natural - but we are not designing a natural language!)

Cheers

Jonathan


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