NetCDF-CF
< Back to Glossary | Edit with Form
NetCDF-CF Description: Standard how to organize your NetCDF files.
Glossary Domain: {{{Glossary Domain}}}"{{{Glossary Domain}}}" is not in the list (WCS, HTAP, AQInfrastructure) of allowed values for the "Glossary Domain" property.
Related Links
Links to this page
[[Links::CF 1.4]]
Contributors
No Contributors
History
No History Available
Term Details
NetCDF file format contains four kinds of information:
- Global attributes
- Simple name=value pairs
- Dimensions
- Only declares the length of the dimension
- Contains no dimension data.
- Variables
- Array data with any number of dimensions.
- Zero dimensions meaning scalar data.
- Variable Attributes:
- Simple name=value pairs associated to a variable.
While these are enough to describe any data, it's not easy to interpret what the data actually means. What is self-evident for humans is difficult for a computer program to reason. If you have a NetCDF viewer, it should be possible just open the file and display the data on a geographic map. But making a program that can automatically get the geographic dimensions from a NC file, is very difficult.
Conventions come to rescue. CF-1.0 Standardizes many things:
- Standard name: what is the measure data about
- Units
- How to tell, that a variable is one of the following:
- Data Variable, containing real data.
- Dimension Coordinate Variable, containing dimension coordinates.
- Dimension Bounds Variable, containing lower and upper bounds of a dimension coordinate.
- Projection
With this part standardized, your program can list the data variables for you and tell you exactly what you can filter by.
Links:
CF 1.0 - 1.4 contain conventions for cube data.
Unofficial CF-1.5 contains point data encoding. Expired certificate, add security exception.
