Sea_floor_depth_below_sea_surface seems very appropriate when the water depth is measured from the surface.
Some communities need to distinguish this measurement from one made from the sea floor. Shipboard water depth measurements in the open ocean generally ignore tides and other variations in sea surface height, while bottom pressure recorders or other instruments used in transport studies are monitoring these differences. The oceansites project is looking for a way to identify this distinction - maybe having 2 "water depth" terms in CF will be the solution, although it may not be clear enough (especially since most people seem to think these terms are synonyms). If this has been mentioned, please excuse; I've been on a ship with terrible network throughput, and I'm slowly trying to catch up with email discussions. Cheers - Nan
I agree, it is arbitrary whether it is called sea_floor_depth_below_sea_surface or sea_surface_height_above_sea_floor and I agree with Roy that consistency with existing names would suggest the former. It's interesting that this kind of ambiguity hasn't arisen before. What you want to name is the distance between two named surfaces. In other names, we call the vertical distance between two surfaces a "thickness" e.g. ocean_mixed_layer_thickness. That doesn't have an associated "direction" (upward or downward) and so avoids this problem. By that analogy the quantity you want to name might be called thickness_of_ocean but I suspect most people would find that less obvious. What we are aiming at principally is clarity. The procedure for adding names is that Alison Pamment, the manager of standard names, will consider them and add them. She is dealing with CMIP5 names at present, I believe, so it might be a while before she gets to this. If no-one else objects soon or makes an alternative proposal, I'd suggest you use this name on the assumption that it will be added to the stdname table in due course. Best wishes Jonathan
-- ******************************************************* * Nan Galbraith (508) 289-2444 * * Upper Ocean Processes Group Mail Stop 29 * * Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution * * Woods Hole, MA 02543 * ******************************************************* _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list CF-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata