Dear Philip and Christiane Thanks for the explanation. I appreciate that the ratio of constituent mass to dry air mass is a sensible quantity to use in a model; I am not disagreeing with that at all. The question is what the standard name should be. I was confused by the proposal and as Philip also says
> >'water vapor in dry air' initially seems to make no sense. It makes sense as a quantity to use, but that name is likely to be baffling to a non-expert user of the dataset, I would say, and so it doesn't seem like an ideal choice for a standard name. This quantity is often called humidity mixing ratio, and that is at present its standard name. We could leave it as that, for the special case of water vapour. But what about other constituents? As far as I can see from the web (but you are the experts) mixing_ratio_of_X_in_air is used variously to mean X/(air including X) or X/(air not including X) and the air might be dry or ambient. Since the numbers are only slightly different, maybe this vagueness is tolerable, or even desirable if you want to compare models that make different choices but still regard the quantities as comparable. If we want to be precise, I think we need more explicit terms. The construction mass_fraction_of_X_in_air seems obviously to mean X/(air including X and ambient moisture). mass_fraction_of_X_in_dry_air would be fine for any X except water vapour, and would mean X/(air including X but not water vapour). Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
