Dear Steve I'm reply to your comment on scalar coord vars on the email list rather than the trac site because I don't want to confuse the discussion in the ticket about clarifying the standards document. Unlike you, I think they do offer significant advantages.
* Creating an extra dimension (of size 1) feels like an overload of machinery if the intention is simply to attach a single coordinate datum to a data variable. This is quite a frequent need. The commonest examples are surface air temperature, at a height of 1.5 m or 2.0 m, or windspeed at 10 m. We quite often recommend, for instance in connection with particular standard names, that the value of a certain other parameter could be specified, e.g. a radiation_wavelength for radiative quantities. Scalar coord vars are a neat way to do this. They are something between multivalued coord vars and attributes in terms of function: easier than coord vars, and more powerful than attributes because they can themselves have attributes. * Apart from not having to create a dimension, using a scalar coord var means avoiding having to decide where to insert this dimension in the order of the dimensions of the data variable. Obviously it makes no difference to the data at all, so this is often a meaningless and arbitrary decision which it is useful not to have to make. Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
