Hi Dan, If an attribute name is not part of CF, then the CF conventions have no opinion on them. That external reference to the CF conventions (and the netCDF users guide) is implicit, and unavoidable. Luckily most of the CF conventions are rather obvious: a "units" attribute is human-readable without context. coordinates or bounds attributes are less trivial, but easy enough to figure out. In that sense: self describing is a goal, but it can never be reached.
On the other hand: if you manage to introduce contradictory metadata into a file, then you get exactly what you deserve, so the question of precedence should not matter: use what you can read and understand. If that is part of CF: great. If you have to be creative, or if you supply data that helps some code to better handle the data: excellent. Kind regards, Maarten -- 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/273#issuecomment-649596062 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].
