Dear Bob > CF section 9.5 says: "The variable carrying the cf_role attribute may > have any data type." > And that makes sense, because some profile_id might be an integer and > theoretically could be a single char. > >> Yes, I agree that on the basis of netCDF >> alone >> you can't tell whether it's a string or a 10-char array. However, the >> cf_role >> is a string-valued attribute, according to the CF convention, so it must >> be a >> string. I expect that for contents of netCDF files that follow the CF con- >> vention this ambiguity shouldn't arise - but if there are cases where it >> does >> we should consider them.
Sorry. Being in a hurry, because you mentioned cf_role, I assumed you were referring to the attribute, rather than the variable which has that attribute. Looking again at the example you sent, I'd say that this file is not a proper CF DSG file; it contains a number of variables which could be individual timeseries, but they haven't been combined into a single data variable so there is no element (or "station") dimension. The "timeseries" variable which you asked about isn't referred to by any of the data variables. I agree that its function is unclear, but I would say it's not CF-compliant anyway, so CF doesn't need to provide an answer to this ambiguity. The file should look like Example H3, H6 or H7 of the CF document. Best wishes Jonathan _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
