CF Coordinate Conventions
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CF_Coordinate_Conventions Description: The purpose of the CF conventions is to create self-describing netCDF files: each variable in the file has an associated description of what it represents, each value can be located in space and time. An important benefit of a convention is that it enables software tools to display data and perform operations on specified subsets of the data with no user intervention. It is equally important that the metadata be easy for human users to write and to understand.
Glossary Domain: WCS, HTAP
Related Links
Links to this page
[[Links::CF Conventions, Standardized Geographic Region Names
Contributors
[[Contributors::Brian Eaton, Jonathan Gregory, Bob Drach, Karl Taylor, Steve Hankin, John Caron, Rich Signell, Phil Bentley, Greg Rappa, CFpeople.]]
History
[[History::The convention was designed by Brian Eaton, Jonathan Gregory, Bob Drach, Karl Taylor and Steve Hankin. Version 1.0, 28 October, 2003, Version 1.1, 17 January, 2008 Version 1.2, 4 May, 2008 Version 1.3, 7 November, 2008 Version 1.4, 27 February, 2009]]
Term Details
CF Metadata in the netCDF files
All the CF metadata is written in attributes. If variables names would have to be standard names, like nitrogen_monoxide, it would limit the number of such variables to one per file. Therefore, to mark a variable, an attribute is used. The convention does not standardize any variable or dimension names.
