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John,I think part of what people are saying is that we don't always have a situation where wavenumber and/or wavelength is unique for every band. This is what has been leading us to the parametric driver coordinate. A further example of this is polarization, which doesn't fit in a nice numeric construct like I was describing in my little example. (I think polarization would likely work well using flags, but that's yet another twist that we don't need to tackle just now.) When Christopher Lynnes is referring to different band numbers, he means index numbers, not wavelengths or wavenumbers. It seems awkward to separate out one band into a different variable from the others because it is not differentiated by wavelength (for example). The problem is, there is a tremendous variety of differentiators for the bands. Some of them clearly should cause data to be separated into different variables (different resolutions, for example), but others "feel" like they shouldn't provoke variable splitting. The feeling could be wrong, (I feel a song coming on here... "if loving you is wrong, then I don't wanna be right!") and we may just need to learn how to think about this differently.
I think what this boils down to is that the "identification space" for the bands can often be multi-dimensional, but the filling of that space is sparse. We are looking for a solution that is somewhat akin to the CF compression by gathering convention.
Jim On 7/26/2011 4:49 PM, John Caron wrote:
On 7/26/2011 2:34 PM, Lynnes, Christopher S. (GSFC-6102) wrote:Im not sure what the difference between the high and low gain, but it might be a good candidate to separate into 2 variables.On Jul 26, 2011, at 3:05 PM, John Caron wrote:The HDF files for MODIS currently do separate the resolutions into different variables. However, MODIS presents some other issues, such as having both low-gain and high-gain versions of the same band in the same 3D variable. Currently, they handle this inside the file by calling one band "13" and another "13.5", but this is a bit opaque. I can never remember which is low and which is high.On 7/26/2011 12:26 PM, Tom Rink wrote:Correct, you need seperate variables for different resolutions. However,Upendra, On 7/26/11 1:07 PM, Upendra Dadi wrote:Jim, Could you please clarify how to represent data which contain bands with multiple spatial resolutions using you scheme? I am thinking of MODIS data:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderate-Resolution_Imaging_Spectroradiometer#MODIS_BandsAs you can see, not all the bands have same spatial resolution (or spatial dimensions), even though all of them have same units. Could we even store all the bands in the same variable?I think multiple resolutions in same variable would be difficult and impracticable, the CF conventions for defining Projections, analytic or lat/lon, don't work like this. You'd probably have to define another dimension to index the different resolutions for the data, lon and lat variables. I would think this would be pretty messy. Tomtheres no problem with having multiple coordinate systems in the same file. So if you chose, you would create multiple groups of variables, each group with their own coordinates.if you accept that a data variable must have either a wavelength or wavenumber coordinate, then we need just those coordinate values (or bounds) to be unique, so they can be named uniquely by coordinate value. Other auxilary coordinates like bandwidth dont need to be unique.There are also two bands (21 and 22) with different band "numbers" but the same bandwidth (different Spectral Reflectance).I have been mentally struggling to understand how these would fit in the various "band" dimension/coordinate proposals.Would it be useful to begin a set of examples for actual instruments so that the less CF-savvy amongst us could see the implications?yes, very helpful. _______________________________________________ cf-satellite mailing list cf-satellite@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxFor list information or to unsubscribe, visit: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/mailing_lists/
-- Jim Biard Government Contractor, STG Inc. Remote Sensing and Applications Division (RSAD) National Climatic Data Center 151 Patton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801-5001 jim.biard@xxxxxxxx 828-271-4900
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