John Caron said the following on 10/20/2010 8:35 AM:
I would be interested to hear what your reasons are to use this form vs
udunits (eg "secs since reference")?
Dear John and a few others who asked similar question,
We have a few data users who prefer ASCII format and we would like to
keep our data only in netCDF. So we thought to provide time data as
ISO-8601 strings in addition to the numerical version. I did not know
about ncdump's -t option so that may be an option for us now.
Another request from some of our data users is that they don't have the
skills or the time to deal with UDUNITS and reference time string in the
'units' attribute and prefer to pass timestamp strings to their software
which then converts them to numerical values.
ISO-8601 time strings are fixed length (21 I think?) so handling in
netcdf-3 is not so hard.
We are currently producing netCDF-3 files but plan to migrate to
netCDF-4 Classic format so working with strings is not going to be an
issue.
Your proposal would amount to standardizing how to include ISO-8601
time strings, but the standard udunits time coordinate would still be
required.
Yes.
At first glance, I might prefer "time_iso8601" over
"time_label_iso8601".
Or "timestamp_iso8601" who worry that just "time_" may be too
reminiscent to string-valued time coordinate.
-Aleksandar
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