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> From: address@hidden (John Sheldon) > Subject: Thanks, and a question > To: address@hidden Hi John, > Thanks for the heads up on the proposed conventions. I had actually > gotten ahold of them early on Friday thru one of our climate > researchers with ties to the authors. I have yet to go all the way > through their (thorough!) proposal - I am absolutely swamped here. > But it is of intense interest and, obviously, a hot topic at the > moment. I'm afraid I overstated the contribution of this new proposal for specifying what multidimensional coordinate variables mean. In my first superficial look at the draft, I saw an example of a multidimensional coordinate variable, but in finally rereading it carefully, it appears that this was only for string coordinates, such as using month names. They pretty much stick to one-dimensional monotonic coordinate variables for everything else, and don't recommend anything like what has been suggested by others for multidimensional coordinate variables. > I wasn't aware the I was in the "digest" format - I do seem to get > messages throughout the day....I'll have to check. (First, I'll have > check how to check...:-) You're not; that message was inadvertently sent by me to the whole list, even though I only meant it for John Caron. Twice in the last week I've made this sort of goof. I'm going to try to be more careful in the future, since my inability to properly use a mailing list that we maintain is getting embarrassing ... > On another topic...many people here are starting to *panic* about the 2 > GB file limit in netCDF. I know you are planning to remove that limit > with netCDF 4, but how far off is that? After convincing everyone here > to convert to netCDF, I am naturally feeling a bit of panic, too :-) ! Permitting bigger files requires a file format change (64-bit offsets instead of 32-bit offsets). We don't want to have to change the netCDF file format more than once, if we can help it. So the file changes required for netCDF 4 will anticipate everything we can think of. It may be more than a year away. I'm afraid I can't give you anything more definite now ... --Russ