CF Metadata Conventions

Overview

The Climate and Forecast (CF) conventions are metadata conventions for earth science data, intended to promote the processing and sharing of files created with the NetCDF Application Programmer Interface. The conventions define metadata that are included in the same file as the data (thus making the file "self-describing"), that provide a definitive description of what the data in each variable represents, and of the spatial and temporal properties of the data. This enables users of data from different sources to decide which quantities are comparable, and allows building applications with powerful extraction, regridding, and display capabilities.

CF is intended for use with state estimation and forecast data, for atmosphere, ocean, and climate. It was designed primarily to address gridded data types such as numerical model outputs and binned climatologies, but it is also applicable to many classes of observational data and has been adopted by a number of groups for such applications. CF is framed as a standard for data written in netCDF, but most of its ideas relate to fluid earth science metadata design in general, not specifically to netCDF.

ummary

Governance

External links

[http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/documents CF Conventions documents]

[http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ CF home page]

[http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/documents/other/cf_overview_article.pdf Overview of CF]

[http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/projects-and-groups-adopting-the-cf-conventions-as-their-standard Projects and Groups using CF (partial)]