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Hello all, (long time no see Ben and Tom) How about creating a conventions to translate BUFR into netCDF? That would work to avoid the proliferation of conventions as far as WMO-GTS data are concerned. WMO is working to make all data distributed in table-driven code i.e. GRIB2 and BUFR. They already made a BUFR template to translate standard METAR (unfortunately that's not To be honest, that's not my original idea --- I once heared that WMO people were thinking about need to establish their own best practice of using netcdf. I guess some people (at least Tom) don't like the idea of table-driven code. But the harm can be mitigated: I mean it is possible to make each netCDF file self-descriptive by including any table reference such as location of stations. -- Eizi TOYODA, Japan Meteorological Agency / Ministry of Foreign Affairs On 7/25/07, Ben Domenico <Ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,
Tom makes an excellent point. Even within our own community, it is crucial
to establish and observe "conventions" for data encoding forms -- e.g. CF
conventions for netCDF. Of course it is even more important when we are
attempting to agree on international standard access protocols/interfaces.
My hope for GALEON is to develop a mechanism whereby we can establish and
evolve the conventions and protocol standards in tandem.
For those of you who are not from the meteorology community:
-- METAR is short for MEteorological Terminal Aerodrome Report ,
the WMO standard form in which surface weather station
observations are transmitted
-- RAOB is RAdiosonde (or sometimes RAwindsonde) OBservation,
the output of a vertical upper air atmospheric sounding
These are the fundamental, long-standing, in-situ observations of the
meteorological community. There are thousands of METAR, and hundreds of
RAOB, reporting stations around the globe. METAR stations produce reports
several times per hour whereas RAOBs are launched only once or twice per
day.
The METAR reports especially are important in many of the OGC and GEOSS demo
scenarios -- along with the weather forecast model output. And, as noted
earlier, the METAR observations are very similar in nature to ocean buoy
observations, river gaging station reports, air quality monitoring reports
and many others. So for interdisciplinary research projects and
operational scenarios where data from different sources must be integrated (
e.g. flood situtions or contaminant plume dispersion), it is absolutely
essential that we establish a common set of conventions and protocols in
order enable each community to access and understand the datasets from the
other communities.\
My own personal desire is to minimize rather than proliferate the number of
conventions and protocols needed to effect the useful exchange of data
between communities of practice.
-- Ben
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