RE: European radar data standard

John,
 
Concerning Opera BUFR:
The missing value for originating center is a creative solution Opera people 
have come up with. Apparently not a good choice for some decoders, but I think 
Opera delivers it's own BUFR software...
Quoting from http://www.knmi.nl/opera/opera2/OPERA_2006_14_BUFR_Guidelines.pdf :
"The solution devised so far by OPERA was to piggyback on the missing value for 
the originating center field in the message. This value is 255 or 65535 
depending on the BUFR edition used (see 3.3)."

Anyhow, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I'll look into dimension scales / CF conventions for the coordinate system and 
perhaps look into the units too.
 
I do believe a translators (like ucar.nc2.dt.radial.UF2Dataset.java and so) 
will be needed to get data from this format into CDM, but at least the HDF5 
part will already be covered.
 
I can't send you an example of a file, because I think there is none yet. 
 
Thanks again and I'll keep in touch about this format.
 
Ernst