Dear CF community, as part of CMIP6 sea-ice output, we would like to allow individual groups to store information on their sub-grid scale ice-thickness distribution. For this distribution, sea-ice models usually assume around 5 different thickness categories, each of which has its own area fraction and actual sea-ice thickness. As ice grows and melts, the thickness and area fraction within the categories changes, but the thickness bounds of each category remain fixed.
To store the sub-grid scale information, we would like to use the existing variables sea_ice_area_fraction and sea_ice_thickness. We suggest, after some help from Alison, that the sub-grid scale information might be stored as follows: "The lower limit of each thickness range provides the coordinate variable. To this coordinate variable, a bounds variable should be attached that gives the upper and lower values of ice thickness for each category. (Following CF conventions doc Section 7.1) for more details of how to do this). The cell_methods attribute would then read, cell_methods = "area: mean where sea_ice (and sea_ice thickness is between category bounds)". " As we have little technical experience with such kind of variable storage, we would be very grateful for any thoughts or input on this suggestion. Thank you very much, Dirk Notz -- ---- Dr. Dirk Notz http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/~notz.dirk _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
