Dear all Here's a small contribution to this large discussion!
I agree with Aleksandar and others that if we permit strings formatted in a particular way for date-times then they should have a standard_name that indicates they are that kind of string, and no units. That is how we treat other string-valued quantities, which have controlled vocabularies, in particular region and area_type. Although Steve is right that this quantity is still time, geophysically speaking, it is functionally different. A calendar is not needed in the string or its units if this convention is allowed only for the real-world calendar. I don't really like the idea of allowing such strings, myself, because of the redundancy and potential inconsistency. I think it would need a safeguard, that if there was a string-valued (auxiliary) coordinate variable of formatted date-time, there had also to be a numerical coordinate variable for the same dimension, encoded in the usual way, giving the same date-time values. Then inconsistency could be detected. But making such a requirement seems to me to emphasise the point that the software used to read the netCDF files ought to be able to do this translation itself, when required. Cheers Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
