@peterkuma, I share your interest in standardizing the treatment of zero and negative years. However, I am afraid your use case may not appropriate for this task. My experience so far is that almost all climate-related obs and model data sets that might use CF encoding are in the domain of only positive year numbers. I speculate that most climate model makers deliberately avoided zero and negative years because of this uncertainty. I might be wrong, I have not checked lately.
You are writing generic software for climate obs and modeling. If you plan to use a fixed reference time for internal software purposes, then I suggest 1 January +0001 00:00, rather than the astronomical calendar base that you mentioned, to reduce problems. Take appropriate care with the Julian/Gregorian discontinuity. If that is not satisfactory, then I am glad to keep discussing a CF amendment. -- 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/298#issuecomment-696967362 This list forwards relevant notifications from Github. It is distinct from cf-metad...@cgd.ucar.edu, 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 cf-metadata-unsubscribe-requ...@listserv.llnl.gov.
