Conventions specific to sub-domains and/or projects

We collect here other conventions which apply to sub-domains of climate science or specific projects, if you know of more please let us know.

CMIP

• CMOR - Climate Model Output Rewriterconventions and associated software used to generate CMIP model output. They also include rules around filenames and directory structure.

• Their variable name tables are often applied to other climate data too, as there is not yet a conventions around variable names.

• CORDEX has similar conventions and variable tables.

Land

• ALMA data exchange convention the Assistance for Land-surface Modelling Activities group established conventions for land-surface schemes and their outputs.

Ocean

• gridspec defined by GFDL in 2019 as a standard for Earth System Model grids to be included in the CF Conventions. It used for MOM5 and MOM6 grids.

• IMOS IMOS] has very specific extensions of the CF conventions for different kind of ocean observation data, which has to be used if you want to contribute data to their portal.

• OceanSITES Data Format - extension of CF Conventions standard for OceanSITES data

• ARGO netCDF conventions for data centers

• PMEL-EPIC Conventions

• US NCEI netCDF templates - these templates illustrate how to apply CF and ACDD conventions

Atmosphere

• NCAR-RAF Conventions for Aircraft Data

Other

• UGRID Conventions for unstructured (e.g. triangular, hex) grids.

• SGRID Conventions for staggered, structured (e.g. ROMS, WRF) grids

• UNIDATA netCDF conventions lists - including COARDS and other older conventions

• AMBER Trajectory Conventions for molecular dynamics simulations.

• CF Discrete Sampling Geometries Conventions - CF for observational and point data

• COMODO ??? still used?

Note

Potential clashes Some of these conventions are a spinoff of the CF Conventions and so there’s an expectation when applied that the files will also be CF compliant. However, as conventions are ever-evolving documents and the groups working on specific conventions are different, it is possible for them to introduce requirements that clash with the CF conventions. An example of this is the different uses for cf_role in UGRID and CF, UGRID requires values for this attributes which are not included in the values allowed by CF. As CF evolves it’s possible that some of these alternatives will become just a use case of CF. In the mentioned example the clash should be resolved with CF v1.11 which should include an integration of UGRID into CF, see the relevant CF github issue.