Hello John,

By '% oxygen concentration in seawater' do you mean what I would term oxygen 
saturation? In 35 years I have seen oxygen CONCENTRATION expressed in many 
units - ml/l, micrograms/litre, micromoles/litre and micromoles/kilogram - but 
never in per cent. I have, however, frequently encountered 'oxygen saturation' 
in per cent.  Oxygen saturation is readily computable from oxygen concentration 
if temperature and salinity are known, so my guess is that the  optode 
processing software is doing that to get a value in per cent.

If this is the case, then the correct Standard Name to use is 
fractional_saturation_of_oxygen_in_sea_water. Don't get hung up on the 
'fractional' and Canonical Units - they just signify the dimension, not the 
scaling - you provide the scaling through the Units parameter attribute, which 
you set to 'percent'.

Cheers, Roy.

From: CF-metadata [mailto:cf-metadata-boun...@cgd.ucar.edu] On Behalf Of John 
Kerfoot
Sent: 06 April 2016 14:28
To: cf-metadata@cgd.ucar.edu
Subject: [CF-metadata] standard name for oxygen concentration in seawater as a 
percentage

I've searched the CF standard name table and can't seem to find a standard_name 
for the % oxygen concentration in seawater.  I did find the following:

fractional_saturation_of_oxygen_in_sea_water
volume_fraction_of_oxygen_in_sea_water

but, unless I'm misunderstanding the definitions, I don't think either of these 
fit this parameter exactly.  The instrument we're using is an optode that 
provides this value directly.

Can anyone shed some light on the proper standard name to use, if it exists?  
Or do I need to explicitly convert % to a fraction?

Thanks,
John

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