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NCAR / CfRadial

NetCDF CF Conventions for radial coordinate data for RADAR and LIDAR
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
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Issues with range coordinate variable in sweep group #11

Open marack opened 5 years ago

marack commented 5 years ago

A couple of minor issues with the range coordinate variable specification in section 5.2.2 (page 25):

  1. The long_name attribute value is styled as a standard_name. Long names are intended to be human readable (suitable for plot / axis titles). Suggest we change it to "Range to measurement volume".
  2. The spacing_is_constant, meters _to_center_of_first_gate and meters_between_gates are technically redundant since this data can be obtained from the array itself. I'm worried about what happens if these values disagree with the array. Do we really need them?
mike-dixon commented 4 years ago

It's true that there is redundancy. Most radars have constant gate spacing, and if spacing_is_constant is true, you can use the other params as they are without needing to check all the way through the range array every time to figure out that everything is at constant spacing. I feel we need some compromise here, between ease of use and theoretical considerations.