Dear Jonathan et al.,
maybe I am fighting a lost battle here, but let me try to argue once more
for a generalized solution, i.e. the addition of "anomaly" as a standard name
modifier. I don't like the idea of adding a new standard name for each new
anomaly: i) this seems illogical and new users will ask "why is there an
anomaly defined for temperature, but nor for precipitation?", ii) past
experience has shown that it takes time to get new standard names adopted, and
if new use cases come up (as they are bound to be for something as essential as
anomalies) it may discourage people to even go for standard names for these
variables. Why not try to make the system as systematic as possible? I don't
want to argue against a pragmatic approach, but if you decide to change the
anomalies from individual standard names to a modifier in three years, the
effort might be much larger, the confusion will be greater and other
"operators" with similar problems will come along. So, my suggestion would be
to de
precate the use of air_pressure_anomaly, air_temperature_anomaly,
geopotential_height_anomaly and surface_temperature_anomaly now and introduce
"anomaly" as a modifier. It's only replacing an underescore by a blank anyhow
;-)
As we just developed some tools to compute multi-model means and model
anomalies for the TFHTAP data sets, I would otherwise have to come up with a
list of ~20 new "_anomaly" standard names. So, besides what I see a rational
argument (above), I have a personal reason for arguing so vehemently.
Cheers,
Martin
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Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH
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Sitz der Gesellschaft: Juelich
Eingetragen im Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Dueren Nr. HR B 3498
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: MinDirig Dr. Karl Eugen Huthmacher
Geschaeftsfuehrung: Prof. Dr. Achim Bachem (Vorsitzender),
Dr. Ulrich Krafft (stellv. Vorsitzender), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Bolt,
Prof. Dr. Sebastian M. Schmidt
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