Thank you for your thoughts on this David, Karl, and Jim. David, I concur with you. Karl, rest assured we are talking about adding cell_methods to _both_ the variable and its coordinate, not the coordinate instead of the variable. Jim, you seem to view coordinates as abstract mathematical axes while I prefer their geophysical meaning. With respect to this discussion I see time similarly to other coordinates like lat, lon, lev. For example, when NCO averages a spatiotemporal region I want users to know that the scalar (or size 1 array) values of time, lat, and lon values in the output represent averages over the original input region and cell_methods seems to be the natural way to do this. Since CF seems to allow cell_methods on coordinates, NCO will continue its current behavior. I hope the NERC CF checker starts to allow this behavior (the Decker/Schultz cfchecker always has).
Best, Charlie p.s. thank you! to whomever fixed the archive URL issue -- Charlie Zender, Earth System Sci. & Computer Sci. University of California, Irvine 949-891-2429 )'( _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
