Dear CF-Meta Mailinglist,

I would like to advertise my long question from two weeks ago. Maybe there were no replies because it was to long :-) . Excuse me if I should be wrong with that assumption. The basic questions are:

What do these two standard names mean?
  (a) mass_concentration_of_ammonium_dry_aerosol_particles_in_air
(b) mass_concentration_of_dry_aerosol_particles_expressed_as_ammonium_in_air

What should be the standard name for the mass concentration of atmospheric particulate chloride/ammonium/nitrate/sulfate/...? Should it be like (a), like (b) or something else (e.g. mass_concentrations_of_particulate_ammonium_in_air)?

Please find details on the question here:
http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/pipermail/cf-metadata/2017/059573.html

Regards,
Daniel



On 27.06.2017 14:43, Daniel Neumann wrote:
Dear CF-Mailinglist,

in a recent proposal (link given below*), Alison and I discussed about the naming conventions for the mass of specific aerosol particle components. There seems to be clarification necessary in the descriptions and/or names. [* recent proposal with discussion: http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/pipermail/cf-metadata/2017/059522.html, look for "10. mass_concentration_of_chloride_dry_aerosol_particles_in_air (kg m-3)"]


Currently, there exist standard names like
> mass_concentration_of_ammonium_dry_aerosol_particles_in_air
> mass_concentration_of_dust_dry_aerosol_particles_in_air
> general form: mass_concentration_of_X_dry_aerosol_particles_in_air
which describe mass concentration of aerosol particles that contain species X. Thus, this standard name describes not only the mass of species X but also the mass of other species that are associated with X on particles. In the past, I thought it would describe the mass of species X only. We think that there is a need for clarifying this in the description of these standard names.


When we now want to quantify the mass of particulate X only (e.g. mass of particulate chloride, mass of particulate ammonium), we could use the standard name
> mass_concentration_of_dry_aerosol_particles_expressed_as_X_in_air

However, I see two problems with respect to this naming convention. First, we get a not-nice name if we want to express the mass concentrations of particulate ammonium in terms of nitrogen. We needed a standard name like > mass_concentration_of_dry_aerosol_particles_expressed_as_ammonium_expressed_as_nitrogen_in_air
which contains 'expressed' twice.

Second (but that is my personal feeling only), I use the "X_expressed_as_Y" formulation only, when there is some relation from Y to X. Or in other words: when Y is a reasonable measure for X.
> ...organic_matter_..._expressed_as_carbon...
> ...nox_expressed_as_nitrogen...
> ...phytoplankton_expressed_as_phosphorus...

Therefore, "mass_concentration_of_dry_aerosol_particles_expressed_as_X_in_air" is not a good choice for a standard name describing the mass of particulate X in my opinion.


An alternative would be to introduce a standard name like
> mass_concentrations_of_particulate_X_in_air
> mass_concentrations_of_particulate_ammonium_in_air
> mass_concentrations_of_particulate_chloride_in_air


What is your opinion on this topic?


Best Regards,
Daniel


--
Daniel Neumann

Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemuende
Physical Oceanography and Instrumentation
Seestrasse 15
18119 Rostock
Germany

phone:  +49-381-5197-287
fax:    +49-381-5197-114 or 440
e-mail: [email protected]

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