Hi Dan,
if we were starting from a blank sheet, that would be a strong point. As it is,
we are rather constrained by the existing practices in the community. I hope
that we can find an agreement along the lines of the discussion that Jonathan
and I are having which makes it possible to
Hi Martin,
I agree there is no clear line between data and metadata and I didn't really
intend to suggest there was one. As you say, there are different equally-valid
views of where the line could/should be drawn in any particular situation
between the different types of data that we wish to
Dear Jonathan,
Sorry, I think I misunderstood the scope of valid usage of "flag_values". I've
only seen it used in contexts in which all values of the flagged array are
translated using the "flag_values"/"flag_meanings" pairs, but you are
suggesting, I think, that it should only apply to the
Hi Dan,
Thanks, that makes it clearer.
The conversation below follows on from one that Karl and I had with people from
CFMIP (Cloud Forcing Model Intercomparison Project). The variable in question,
contains the histogram, is produced to make it possible to compare climate
model output with
Hi Martin,
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that we would do away with the histogram standard
names - these would be retained, of course. I just meant that we both want to
store one extra bit of information (maximum number of obs or, equivalently,
missing number of obs) and that in both use cases
Dear Martin
I agree that if valid_range implies masked-out data in some software, we can't
put special values out of the range, and that we shouldn't tamper with missing
data. I still think that flag_values is a better way to indicate special
values in a coordinate variable than an auxiliary
Hi Dan,
it is a similar concept, but the aim here is to record it in a histogram. We
have a standard name for the histogram .. I'm not sure why you think we need
to change this. Perhaps it would be possible to do away with "histogram_"
standard names and just use "number_of_observations",
Hi Martin,
Thanks for your suggestion - I can see how this could work for our data.
However I can also see that having to parse the 'interval' text from the
'cell_methods' comment field and combine that with the bounds from the time
coordinate is not especially user-friendly! It would be much
Hello Dan,
I think there is a method for recording the number of valid observations in
each data point, which, if I've understood correctly, would meet the
requirement you are describing: using an "ancillary_variable" with standard
name "number_of_observations". I don't think there is a
Dear Martin/Jonathan/Jim,
I appreciate that this discussion is focussed on histograms, however I wonder
if there is a wider issue here i.e. how should one record the number of missing
values for any extensive quantity?
For example, we use number_of_days_with_air_temperature_below_threshold to
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