Section: 8.0 Conventions

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8.0 Conventions

Developers should be familiar with and use existing netCDF conventions, when practical.

A separate section of this workshop covers the Climate and Forecast (CF) Conventions in more detail.

The NetCDF User's Guide recommends some generic attribute conventions, such as use of a "units" attribute and a "Conventions" attribute to identify any other conventions used.
Other netCDF conventions are published agreements about how data of a particular type or within a particular discipline should be represented to foster interoperability.
Most conventions are about attributes and their meanings. This allows freedom to choose convenient variable and dimension names.
Use of an existing convention is highly recommended to make data usable in applications that require conformance to that convention.
We recommend use of the CF Conventions, if applicable.
A netCDF file should use the global "Conventions" attribute to identify which conventions it uses, for example:
```
       :Conventions = "CF-1.3" ;
    
```

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