Section: 6 Best Practices

6.0	Overview A body of best practices (or at least "not bad practices") has matured for netCDF classic.
6.1	Purpose of Conventions Why are conventions needed, if we have standard formats?
6.2	Conventions Developers should be familiar with and use existing netCDF conventions, when practical.
6.3	Coordinate Systems Spatial and temporal location of data are supported by use of coordinate systems.
6.4	Variable Grouping How you group data into variables can determine whether common analysis and visualization software can effectively use the data.
6.5	Variable Attributes Conventional variable attributes supply necessary metadata.
6.6	Strings and Character Variables Use character data properly for representing text strings.
6.7	Calendar Date and Time Represent calendar dates and times with standards and conventions.
6.8	Packed Data Values Conventions for packing numeric data to save space have some subtleties.
6.9	Missing Data Values To indicate that data values are missing, invalid, or not written, special values are conventionally used.
6.10	Summary Things to remember about netCDF best practicies.