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11.7 Calendar Date and Time
Represent calendar dates and times with standards and conventions.

Two conventions for storing a date/time into a netCDF variable are:

  1. CF-compliant: as a numeric value with a udunits time unit, such as
        "seconds since 1992-10-8 15:00:00"
    
  2. ISO-compliant: as a string using ISO 8601 encoding, such as "2010-10-25T12:00:00Z".

The ncdump "-t" option displays CF-compliant times in human readable form, close to ISO-8601, e.g. "2010-10-25 12", respecting CF climate calendar attributes, if specified.

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