Unidata developer John Caron spends a big portion of his time thinking about how to make the formats in which scientific data are stored more useful and robust. If you're a user of the GRIB or BUFR formats, or just have an interest in the long-term viability of data formats in general, read on.

You may be shocked that netCDF coordinates can't always be monotonic. Other embarrassing facts are also revealed.

When model data is encoded in GRIB, the dataset schema is lost. So is an unambiguous identification of the the schema variables. To deal with these problems, GRIB reading libraries probably make assumptions that may not be valid for all datasets.

Problems with external tables make BUFR/GRIB not suitable as long-term storage formats. To solve this, there must be a foolproof way for reading software to know what tables the writing software used, and there must be an authoritative registry of tables.