I can offer a clear-cut use case: the ensemble dimension. If you have output from multiple simulations that you want to combine into a single block of data for analysis, you can easily do so with NCO's ncecat operator. However, if you want to label the members of the ensemble in a CF-compliant way, as far as I'm aware the only way to do it is via flag_values and flag_meanings attributes, which is awkward and not what those constructs were intended for. It would be much simpler to simply make the value of the coordinate an identifying string.
For example, I have a dataset containing simulations from six different RCMs all driven by the ERA-Interim reanalysis. If string-valued coordinates were allowed, when I concatenate outputs from the different simulations into a single file for comparison, I could set the coordinate values to the names of the RCMs. This would simplify analyses using tools like R and Python that can already handle string-valued vectors. -- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/issues/174#issuecomment-595909313 This list forwards relevant notifications from Github. It is distinct from [email protected], although if you do nothing, a subscription to the UCAR list will result in a subscription to this list. To unsubscribe from this list only, send a message to [email protected].
