Dear Joe I agree with Karl. It is important to be able to record the data on its own model grid, and the auxiliary coords are essential then for locating the data. I don't know whether there are plans to support them in Ferret and GrADS - I hope so - but even if not, that doesn't mean they aren't essential. When I analyse data from the NEMO ocean model on its tripolar (non-lat-lon) grid using IDL, for instance, I use the auxiliary coordinates.
As far as climate modellers are concerned, data-writers and data-consumers are largely the same people. The CF convention started with climate modelling, and we have included the metadata judged necessary to describe and analyse the data. Since data tends to persist for a long time in archives and remain of interest, it is important to devise and record the metadata at the time you write the data, even if software hasn't been written to use it automatically at that time. It can still be used, by using simpler tools like the netCDF library directly, or by a human reading the file! It wouldn't make sense to me to exclude useful metadata from being recorded on the grounds that it was difficult to keep up the software development to use it. Rather than restricting the development of the convention, perhaps what is needed is some discussion of priorities for implementation in software? Some metadata is certainly more generally needed. For example, I would say it is more important to implement auxiliary coords than to support grid mappings. That's because aux coords allow you to visualise and do a good deal of analysis with data on any grid; grid mappings become necessary if you want to do your own accurate calculations about the coordinate system. Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
