Hi Philip,

Your idea makes sense at least for me.
My bottom line is to avoid being forced to use vertical axis to identify types of clouds.

One thing: WMO is umbrella for too many programmes. So it is a bit unclear to specify cloud definitions in operational synoptic meteorology. So following might be clearer.

SYNOP_high_cloud_area_fraction
SYNOP_middle_cloud_area_fraction
SYNOP_low_cloud_fraction

(Heiko, what do you think? ?)

Eizi
----- Original Message ----- From: "Cameron-smith, Philip" <[email protected]> To: "Jonathan Gregory" <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2012 4:19 PM
Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] Standard_name for cloud-cover by phenomenon


Hi All,

I am not wild about using 'type'. I had to read the terms several times before I figured out what was being meant, because I could read it different grammatical ways.

A second problem is that it seems a particular definition will be linked to these terms (or did I miss something?), yet someone might reasonably want to use a different definition for high/middle/low clouds in the future.

Although I generally don't like including the origin of the data in the std_name, I think this may be an exception. I would suggest using either

ISCCP_high_cloud_area_fraction
ISCCP_middle_cloud_area_fraction
ISCCP_low_cloud_fraction

or

WMO_high_cloud_area_fraction
WMO_middle_cloud_area_fraction
WMO_low_cloud_fraction

I note that isccp_cloud_area_fraction is already an accepted std_name, so the suggestions above follow naturally.

This would also allow changes to the high/middle/low definitions in the future. This would be a problem if there is a proliferation of definitions, but I doubt this will be a problem.

Best wishes,

    Philip

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Philip Cameron-Smith, [email protected], Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
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-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Gregory
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2012 7:10 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [CF-metadata] Standard_name for cloud-cover by phenomenon

Dear Heiko

I just had a short side-discussion with Eizi, and we settled on
'type', i.e. we propose the standard names:

high_type_cloud_area_fraction
middle_type_cloud_area_fraction
low_type_cloud_area_fraction

These look fine to me. As you said to John, I hope that "type" would trigger
people to look up the definition.

Best wishes and thanks

Jonathan
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