Dear all, Many observation-based quantities are derived from a number of separate measurements e.g. a monthly precipitation total may be the sum of a series of daily values. In some cases the derived value is based on an incomplete set of constituent observations and it would be useful to record the amount of missing data. The number of measurements used to calculate a derived value is easily stored using the 'number_of_observations' standard name, but knowing how many observations there could have been is not so straightforward. In theory it could be worked out from the bounds of the time coordinate and information on the interval between the original measurements from the cell_methods attribute, however this is not especially user-friendly. I'd therefore like to propose the following new standard name:
Standard name: number_of_missing_observations Canonical units: 1 Definition: A variable with the standard name of number_of_missing_observations contains the number of discrete observations or measurements that were not available to derive the values of another data variable. The linkage between the data variable and the variable with a standard_name of number_of_missing_observations is achieved using the ancillary_variables attribute. Comments welcome. Regards, Dan Dan Hollis Climatologist Met Office Hadley Centre FitzRoy Road Exeter Devon EX1 3PB United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)1392 884535 Mob: +44 (0)7342058682 Fax: +44 (0)1392 885681 E-mail: dan.hol...@metoffice.gov.uk<mailto:dan.hol...@metoffice.gov.uk> Website: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk<http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/> For UK climate and past weather information, visit http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate
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