Dear John Thanks for your email. CF standard names are designed with the intention of being self-explanatory, so it would be better to have a longer phrase which describes what the quantity is in physical terms. The standard_name table should give some ideas about how to do that. I notice that there is an existing standard_name of surface_backwards_scattering_coefficient_of_radar_wave. Is that related to this quantity perhaps?
Cheers Jonathan > Radar Scatterometers, such as QuikSCAT, are used to measure the winds over > the oceans, Arctic and Antarctic ice age, track icebergs, among other things > by measuring a value called sigma naught, also known in the radar community > as the normalized radar cross-section or backscatter coefficient. Due to a > significant effort to reprocess multiple sigma naught datasets to netCDF > format, which shall be hosted at the Physical Oceanography Distributed Active > Archive Center (http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov<http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/>) for > public distribution, I propose the following standard_name definition be > added to the CF standard name: > > standard_name: > sigma_naught > > Definition: > sigma_naught refers to the normalized radar cross section, also known in the > microwave remote sensing community as the backscatter coefficient. > > Canonical Units: > dB > > > Sincerely, > John Niedfeldt > _______________________________________________ > CF-metadata mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata ----- End forwarded message ----- _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
