Re: Current status of netcdf naming conventions

>Organization: University of Washington
>Keywords: 199404292040.AA12123 

Hi Harry,

> We are running into netCDF naming convention problems between
> different software developers (such as, is the correct attribute for
> non-existent data _FillValue, missing_data, or missing_value).  Do you
> have a current document that states the collected wisdom of the netCDF
> developers as to the proper naming conventions?  Thanks.

The current NUWG convention documents are all in

    ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/Conventions/NUWG/

and they all specify using "_FillValue".  This is the only attribute that
the netCDF library will recognize and treat specially, by using it to
override the default fill values when prefilling data because of writes out
of sequential order.

There are other non-NUWG developers who have published other conventions in
the Conventions directory that you might want to look at as well.

--Russ