I understand that for climate or forecast data that 30+ seconds of inaccuracy may not be significant, but even though the C and F in "CF Conventions" stand for "Climate and Forecast", the conventions are also being increasingly adopted for instrument and measurement datasets. In these cases, time accuracy at small time scales becomes more important, which is why seeing a proposed convention that allows the time to be written ambiguously (so that there may or may not be discontinuities or offsets) is rather disconcerting, like telling a climate scientist that the netCDF encoding of his temperature data may or may not have introduced an inaccuracy of a few Kelvin in some readings.
Under the CF1.6 conventions, I believe the base time or epoch time was always expressed in UTC and the calendar attribute was applied to the encoded time count. Using this convention, I could specify a UTC start time and then have a simple GPS-like count of elapsed seconds (with no discontinuities introduced by leap seconds). Under the proposals for the 1.7 convention, this doesn't seem possible. The epoch and time count must both be expressed either as UTC or as GPS time and the only "mixed calendar" options introduce the above mentioned ambiguity. Regards, Tim Patterson Any email message from EUMETSAT is sent in good faith but shall neither be binding nor construed as constituting a commitment by EUMETSAT, except where provided for in a written agreement or contract or if explicitly stated in the email. Please note that any views or opinions presented in this email are solely those of the sender and do not necessarily represent those of EUMETSAT. This message and any attachments are intended for the sole use of the addressee(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorised use, disclosure, dissemination or distribution (in whole or in part) of its contents is not permitted. If you received this message in error, please notify the sender and delete it from your system. _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
