Dear Thomas Thanks for your posting about vectors. This issue has come up before. It has previously been suggested that different components should be in the same data variable, with a dimension for component, but I prefer your solution, because the components might have different units (e.g. in the case of modulus and direction), and they might be on different horizontal grids (e.g. for an Arakawa C-grid), which makes it undesirable or impossible to store them in a single data variable. Furthermore, your solution is more flexible since it allows you to have several different decompositions in the same file, as you say. It is also backwards-compatible; the variables containing components are described exactly as before, and we have the extra umbrella variable showing some associations between them, which should not cause a problem to any existing software.
We would need more standard names, as you say, and these could be proposed as required. The new standard names would be permitted only with the umbrella variables, or with ancillaries of the umbrella variables. Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
