Can we expect standard units for all submitted data?

ioos / comt

IOOS Coastal and Ocean Modeling Testbed. See:

https://github.com/ioos/comt/wiki

MIT License

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Can we expect standard units for all submitted data? #23

Open kknee opened 9 years ago

kknee commented 9 years ago

For example, will winds always be m/s, etc? Important for correctly annotating our legends in the UI.

rluettich commented 9 years ago

I believe we should anticipate that winds could be in m/s, mph and knots.

Rick

From: Kelly Knee [mailto:notifications@github.com] Sent: Friday, August 01, 2014 5:19 PM To: ioos/comt Subject: [comt] Can we expect standard units for all submitted data? (#23)

For example, will winds always be m/s, etc? Important for correctly annotating our legends in the UI.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ioos/comt/issues/23.

kknee commented 9 years ago

Okay, would be good to discuss implications for variables that will be compared across models during this weeks meetings.

rluettich commented 9 years ago

Is there an available toolbox that does relatively routine units conversions?

From: Kelly Knee [mailto:notifications@github.com] Sent: Sunday, August 03, 2014 10:25 PM To: ioos/comt Cc: Luettich, Rick Subject: Re: [comt] Can we expect standard units for all submitted data? (#23)

Okay, would be good to discuss implications for variables that will be compared across models during this weeks meetings.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ioos/comt/issues/23#issuecomment-51012083.

brianmckenna commented 9 years ago

There is, UDUNITS (Unidata product) is actually packaged with most NetCDF libraries.

I'm not too worried about making the conversion happen as much as defining where it should happen in the workflow. The further down the line we take it, the more likely we are to introduce error.

rsignell-usgs commented 9 years ago

For Matlab, nctoolbox has a routine called ncunits For Python, Iris has routine called convert_units

kknee commented 9 years ago

So the remaining questions are:

Where should this conversion happen?
What units to use for each parameter?

rsignell-usgs commented 9 years ago

My vote is to go with MKS, since the testbed is for scientists

currents and winds:   m/s
temperature: degC
salinity: ppt (model datasets should be encoded as units=0.001 to be CF compliant, but often say PSU or something else)
oxygen:  mg/l
elevation: m

others?

rluettich commented 9 years ago

I agree.

Rick

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 8, 2014, at 3:12 PM, "Rich Signell" notifications@github.com<mailto:notifications@github.com> wrote:

My vote is to go with MKS, since the testbed is for scientists

currents and winds: m/s temperature: degC salinity: ppt (model datasets should be encoded as units=0.001 to be CF compliant, but often say PSU or something else) oxygen: mg/l elevation: m

others?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/ioos/comt/issues/23#issuecomment-51645355.

drf5n commented 8 years ago

CF compliant just means that the units have to be conformant with the canonical units, so the source data should have units defined, and the UI should check the units and convert if appropriate.