Dear Martin and Jim Thanks for this point.
> The alternative is to continue to use area_type, and to explain to > people that they need to request new area types when the existing > ones don't match their model outputs and explain to them how to make > the requests. Doable, but it might generate a large and confusing > number of area type table entries. In fact area_type was introduced as a standard_name so that we could follow a generalised approach to area fractions, with a string-valued coordinate, because in a given grid cell there might be various types of vegetation and other non-vegetated types like sea and ice. I think this approach is a good one, and that more area types should be proposed to meet the needs of CMIP6. I guess that there must be experts on this in some relevant MIPs. This would enable comparison of datasets from different models, which is the main purpose of CF. If they all use different descriptions of vegetation types that purpose isn't served well. Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
