I believe this is correct; a 'time' has to be a numeric value. What about using 'date' for string-valued times? That was my homebrew solution when I was considering a similar problem.
(Note that string data is a big pain to deal with in NetCDF-3, because you're limited to fixed-length character arrays. You need to use NetCDF-4 / HDF5 to get Strings as a data type.) Cheers, --Seth On Tue, 19 Oct 2010 09:21:25 -0400 Aleksandar Jelenak <aleksandar.jele...@noaa.gov> wrote: >Dear Olivier, > >Aleksandar Jelenak wrote on 10/19/10 7:58 AM: >> Lauret Olivier wrote on 10/18/10 10:51 AM: >>> ยท Are you sure you need a standard name such as "time_label_iso8601"? >>> I mean: isn't it possible to use "time" standard name instead? (And >>> put somewhere that it is ISO 8601 compliant information, like in >>> 'long name' attribute) >> >> It is possible and I can think of several alternative ways of doing that >> ('comments' variable attribute?). I am not sure though if it would be >> appropriate to use the standard name associated with numerical time data. > >Actually, I don't think it is possible to use 'time' standard name in such >cases. If I correctly interpret CF rules for using standard names, 'time' data >can be only in the physically-equivalent units to "seconds". Strings, being >dimensionless, do not qualify. > > -Aleksandar >_______________________________________________ >CF-metadata mailing list >CF-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu >http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list CF-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata