Conventions

11.3 Conventions

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

A separate session of this workshop discusses the (Climate and Forecast (CF) Conventions), which Unidata recommends if applicable..

The NetCDF User's Guide recommends a few generic attribute conventions, such as use of "units" and "Conventions" attributes.
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, allowing free choice for variable and dimension names.
Use of an existing convention is highly recommended for access by standards-compliant applications.
A netCDF file should use the global "Conventions" attribute to identify which conventions it depends on, for example:
```
     :Conventions = "CF-1.5" ;
```
Software for visualization and analysis should specify which formats they can read and which conventions they require, for example, "CF-compliant netCDF data".