Advice: CF standard names for rain garden water properties

[IvanaH8]

I would like to ask for any advice.

We have a dataset describing water properties in rain garden and used for monitoring the garden's performance. Rain gardens are a nature-based solution for urban water treatment, storage and reuse, are one of the most simple and beneficial approaches towards climate change adaptation. The water in the garden comes from rain and urban runoff and as such should be treated as fresh water. And that is where we find difficulties associating any standard names we could use.

The properties measured include water temperature, turbidity and conductivity. Any of those can only be found related to sea water, where "sea" seems to define all types of water in the CF context.

Based on the discussion in cf-convention/vocabularies#25 that tried to propose lake water related variable names, we have these options:

• use sea water related names (e.g. sea_water_temperature) and specify the area type (in our case possibly rain or urban from the CF Area Type Table to preserve interoperability
  • but we feel using "sea" in our variable names could be misleading (not everyone would assume that sea water means all water)
• provide only long name (no standard name) with proposing the long name as a new standard name
  • but again referring to the discussion in cf-convention/vocabularies#25 it seems highly unlikely that the names we need would get through

We seek to comply with CF conventions as much as possible but struggle now to find a solution for this case.

Would anyone have any suggestion on how we can go about this?

[JonathanGregory]

Dear @IvanaH8

You are right that the issue of standard names for properties of water in lakes and rivers has been often raised but not yet solved satisfactorily, most recently discussed in https://github.com/cf-convention/vocabularies/issues/25, as you say. However, I think you could argue that runoff isn't the same. Water counted as "runoff" is on the way to a river, lake or the sea, but it's not there yet. Is it correct that the water collected in the rain garden is runoff, like the water from urban drainage? We have several standard names referring to runoff, and even some which imply it has properties (temperature and iron concentration, for instance). Therefore I think it would be reasonable and consistent to define standard names such as runoff_water_temperature.

Best wishes

Jonathan

[efisher008]

Dear @IvanaH8,

Thank you for your question. Is proposing some new standard names related to runoff properties i.e. water temperature, turbidity and conductivity as mentioned, something which you would now like to pursue here?

Best wishes, Ellie