CF Conventions for NetCDF: 2020 ESIP Summer Meeting Session

The CF (Climate and Forecast) Conventions are a community-developed metadata standard for storing and describing Earth system science data in the netCDF binary data format. Numerous existing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and commercial software tools can explore, analyze, and visualize data that is encoded using the CF Conventions. The CF community holds annual workshops to develop, refine, and review enhancements to the CF Conventions and to manage the CF governance and processes.

This session will provide an update and time for discussion of current and future efforts and directions for the CF Conventions.

Agenda

• Technology, Welcome, Introductions (15 min) - Ethan Davis

• CF Basics & Data Model (15 min) - David Hassell

• CF Standard Names (15 min) - Alison Pamment

• CF Standard Names: Biological Taxa (15 min) - Roy Lowry

• CF Governance & the Future (15 min) - Daniel Lee

• Further Discussion (15 min)

Session Summary / Takeaways

• CF is a Community Effort, all are welcome and encouraged to participate

• CF Data Model is part of CF as of CF 1.9. The data model is described and compared with other related data models in a 2017 paper in Geoscientific Model Development -- https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-10-4619-2017

• CF Standard Names and ways to relate them to other vocabularies (e.g., the biological taxon vocabularies Roy presented) were of great interest.

• Also of interest, accessing CF Standard Names as Linked Data / ontology.