John-

On 3/26/11 12:51 PM, John Caron wrote:

It seems like the essential thing you need is calendar field
manipulation, to get around the variable month problem.

yes.

If you didnt
have the 3 in "3 months since 2011-04-01", you could just multiply by 3
in your coordinate values.

However, then you lose the semantics of a 3 month interval. As Benno (sorry for spelling your name wrong last time) showed, the semantics of the qualifier for x since have real meaning in climate datasets.

I am looking at how hard that would be to support, but it does add
perhaps unneeded complexity.

But it adds semantics of the time periods in question.

Don

On 3/26/2011 7:46 AM, Don Murray wrote:
John-

On 3/25/11 4:54 PM, John Caron wrote:
On 3/22/2011 6:53 AM, John Caron wrote:
Consider:

int time(sample=1001);
:long_name = "Measurement time";
:standard_name = "time";
:units = "days since 1970-01-01";

vs

int time(sample=1001);
:long_name = "Measurement time";
:standard_name = "time";
:units = "3 days since 1970-01-01";

values = 1, 2, 3, ...

are these equivalent or does the second one mean every 3 days ? Is the
second one illegal ?

Im am going to assume that the second form is illegal, that is, you may
not have a number in front of the unit in a "time coordinate unit" (CF
section 4.4)

I agree with Beno that it should be legal. GrADS gives their units in
terms of N (minutes, hours, days, months, years) from a reference
time. When I wrote the GrADS IOSP, I originally was using this syntax,
because then your time coordinate values are 0,1,2,..... However, 3mo
intervals came up with the problems that you have shown here, so I
converted everything to hours since the base date. But, if we had a
library that would compute 3mo since 2011-04-01 as 2011-07-01, I would
revert to that syntax because it is closer to the original GrADS
definition.

Don

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Don Murray
NOAA/ESRL/PSD and CIRES
303-497-3596
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/don.murray/
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