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Re: Thanks, and a question

> From: address@hidden (John Sheldon)
> Subject: Thanks, and a question
> To: address@hidden

Hi John,

> Thanks for the heads up on the proposed conventions.  I had actually
> gotten ahold of them early on Friday thru one of our climate
> researchers with ties to the authors.  I have yet to go all the way
> through their (thorough!) proposal - I am absolutely swamped here.
> But it is of intense interest and, obviously, a hot topic at the
> moment.

I'm afraid I overstated the contribution of this new proposal for
specifying what multidimensional coordinate variables mean.  In my first
superficial look at the draft, I saw an example of a multidimensional
coordinate variable, but in finally rereading it carefully, it appears
that this was only for string coordinates, such as using month names.
They pretty much stick to one-dimensional monotonic coordinate variables
for everything else, and don't recommend anything like what has been
suggested by others for multidimensional coordinate variables.

> I wasn't aware the I was in the "digest" format - I do seem to get
> messages throughout the day....I'll have to check. (First, I'll have
> check how to check...:-)

You're not; that message was inadvertently sent by me to the whole list,
even though I only meant it for John Caron.  Twice in the last week I've
made this sort of goof.  I'm going to try to be more careful in the
future, since my inability to properly use a mailing list that we
maintain is getting embarrassing ...

> On another topic...many people here are starting to *panic* about the 2
> GB file limit in netCDF.  I know you are planning to remove that limit
> with netCDF 4, but how far off is that?  After convincing everyone here
> to convert to netCDF, I am naturally feeling a bit of panic, too :-) !

Permitting bigger files requires a file format change (64-bit offsets
instead of 32-bit offsets).  We don't want to have to change the netCDF
file format more than once, if we can help it.  So the file changes
required for netCDF 4 will anticipate everything we can think of.  It
may be more than a year away.  I'm afraid I can't give you anything more
definite now ...

--Russ