Chair: Thorsten Büßelberg
WMO contact: Enrico Fucile (WMO)
Location: Met Office, Fitzroy Road, Exeter
Date: 19-20 September 2019
The wide use of netCDF as a data format for scientific purposes is well known and accepted. The standard is very flexible and easy to use but it doesn’t provide rules for the semantic interoperability of systems. The CF (Climate and Forecast) conventions provide a framework enabling interoperability at semantic level in many contexts and mostly for the purpose of scientific data exchange. WMO has developed a set of data formats enabling syntactic and semantic interoperability for the operations of the World Weather Watch (WWW) programme and is planning to extend the WWW to other fields covering the Earth system model with a seamless approach on time and space scales. The wider community involved in the new sub-systems and scales is using netCDF with various degrees of compliance to different conventions. WMO is investigating the opportunities and costs of developing regulations, based on the CF conventions. The goal of enabling semantic interoperability in the exchange of netCDF data for WMO purposes in the WMO Information System (WIS) is being assessed and will be a focus for the workshop. A primary aim for the workshop is to investigate a potential governance model for the netCDF-CF data representations to be used in WIS in a framework of collaboration with the CF community.
