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Hello Ghansham... I hope you are well. I believe the "scan direction" (either "up/down" or "left/right") is a matter of perspective -- if the frame of reference is on the satellite, looking "forward" along the flight path, then I would be more inclined to say "left/right", as "up/down" would refer to some vertical scanning -- from my frame of reference on the satellite. Regarding CF Conventions. There are no conventions for dealing with this. There have been discussions in the past dealing with "swath data", and you might have a Google of that (plus 'netcdf') and see what others have been thinking about. There is also at least one reference to some data already being written to hdf files, which might prove of interest. The sad fact is that the satellite community for the longest time did not embrace NetCDF, and so we must play "catch-up" with the people who have defined conventions for model/gridded data and in-situ data. My take is that some common characteristics (like 'band' and 'central_wavelength' (or _wavenumber) should be defined using conventions and "standard_names", but that characteristics of particular platforms must, by necessity, be defined for those platforms. I also think that the use of the "standard_names" will go a long way toward helping application developers in writing file readers that can understand some of the basic structures of the data, while at the same time providing end users an opportunity to write specialized interfaces that meet their particular research or operational needs. Best wishes, tom -- Tom Whittaker University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science & Engineering Center (SSEC) Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) 1225 W. Dayton Street Madison, WI 53706 USA ph: +1 608 262 2759
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