Dear all If we say, "applications are free to assume that data is missing where the auxiliary coordinates are missing" (John Caron's words), it means that applications can also choose to do something else, such as trying to guess what the location is and plotting it or doing some calculation with that guess. As far as the data-provider is concerned, that behaviour is unpredictable (John Graybeal's word), since different analysis software will do different things. Some of them may be appropriate, some of them might not be. This doesn't sound good to me, and it's why I tend to think that missing values in aux coords should not be allowed where there is non-missing data.
To repeat, that is not an argument against storing the information in the file, just for not for labelling it as an aux coord variable. In a second step, the data-provider might reprocess the file and fill in the missing values. Then it can safely be an aux coord var. It is now reliable, since the values have been estimated by an appropriate method by the original data provider. Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
