I personally think including this level of detail (number of standard 
deviations, upper/lower limits, gap length, name of climatology used, distance 
to 'neighbor' data, etc) is beyond the scope of CF; there are just too many 
details. Every test has its own inputs, and these may vary with different 
organizations using this new set of standard names. Even QARTOD tests may be 
implemented in different ways by different organizations, who may have 
different requirements for documentation.

If you feel that your data providers' quality assessments need to come with 
machine readable details, you could define those terms as extra required 
attributes for QARTOD (or more correctly, for the IOOS implementation of  
QARTOD) compliance; this can be documented in the resource (web page or 
service, presumably) that describes the specific test. The data files would be 
perfectly usable without these details, but I can see why you'd want a standard 
vocabulary to describe the inputs. (That said, many users will simply trust the 
data providers' assessment anyway - and assume they chose appropriate levels 
for the test inputs.)

In the OceanSITES project, we assign additional required attributes to items 
that are part of CF (or part of another standard, like NCADD). A file can be CF 
compliant and not include these details, but it's not OS compliant unless it 
has them. The OS definitions are in our data format reference manual (and, more 
briefly, our other data manuals), but the web page that defines the IOOS's 
implementation of the QARTOD tests could include some description of the 
additional attributes required. e.g. for the flat_line_test:

**qc_flat_line_test IOOS required attributes**
1. standard_name = "flat_line_test_quality_flag";
2. flag_meanings, flag_values
3. min_length_points (or min_length_minutes)



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