CF Conventions for netCDF: Support for Data Access, Analysis, and Visualization

Ethan Davis, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Unidata, Boulder, CO, United States, Guilherme P Castelao, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA, United States, David Hassell, University of Reading, Meteorology, Reading, United Kingdom, Jessica Hausman, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, United States, Aleksandar Jelenak, HDF Group, Champaign, IL, United States, Daniel Lee, EUMETSAT, Darmstadt, Germany and Kevin O'Brien, NOAA/PMEL UW Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, Seattle, WA, United States
Abstract:
CF is a community-developed metadata convention for storing and describing earth system science data in the netCDF binary data format. Numerous existing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and commercial software tools can explore, analyze, and visualize data that is stored and described as netCDF-CF data, e.g., ERDDAP and TDS. Several ocean observing communities, such as Argo, OceanSITES and Ocean Gliders, already recommend netCDF-CF as the data format of choice and the WMO is investigating the use of CF and how to engage with and in the CF governance and process.

The CF community holds annual workshops to develop, refine, and review enhancements to the CF convention and to manage CF governance and processes. Recent projects and community efforts have developed several extensions to netCDF-CF that have or soon will be proposed to the netCDF-CF community.

This presentation will provide an update of recent work and an overview of the 2019 CF Workshop reviewing the topics covered and decisions that were made. Including:

  • Recent work on CF enhancements
    • Geometries proposal (accepted for CF 1.8): can be used to represent, e.g., river flow data for a network of river segments
    • Groups proposal (accepted for CF 1.8) supports hierarchical directory-like structures for data and metadata
    • Satellite Swath proposal represents satellite data in the original instrument viewing geometry
    • NetCDF for Linked Data (proposed to OGC)
    • Uncertainty quantification proposal
  • Evolving CF Governance and Process
    • Continue move to use GitHub to better support community involvement
    • Integration of the CF Data Model into the CF process
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