Notes on CF compliance
The CF ("Climate and Forecast") convention identifies a convention for including metadata in NetCDF files (NetCDF API) that makes them "self describing" (if one has a description of the conventions) , facilitating the processing and sharing of files by agreeing upon common metadata that should be included in the netCDF files (e.g. standard names, units, etc) so that files created by different authors can be easily shared.
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The CF home page is found at http://cfconventions.org/
Web-based CF compliance checker
A web-based CF compliance checker is described on the CF Home page, and it is repeated here http://puma.nerc.ac.uk/cgi-bin/cf-checker.pl. You can use it to check any files you create for observational or model datasets. The check will identify non-compliant aspects of your netCDF files.
The web-based checker is very easy to use, and very informative. But it is painful to check many files, or to check very large netCDF files remotely. The code for that CF checker is written in python and it is in principle available for use on any platform, but it is very difficult to install, requiring old versions of python and numpy. BenjaminM (Unlicensed) investigated its use in our first assessment of CF compliance for the files in the NCAR NCL observational data directory.
ACME "quick-and-dirty" CF compliance checker
Phil Rasch (pnl.gov) wrote a lightweight shell script that uses curl to send a small version of the file to the checker, and accesses accesses the NERC website from a linux/unix command line so you dont don't need to install the checker, and you can check many files quickly. The script is stored in the github diagnostics Repo at PreAndPostProcessingScripts repository at https://github.com/ACME-Climate/DiagnosticsWorkflowPreAndPostProcessingScripts/blob/master/qdcf.The script is called "qdcf" for "quick and dirty CF" checker.utils/quick_and_dirty_cf_compliance_checker.
To obtain a copy of the script, it is best to check out the repository from github (making it easier to obtain future updates):
git clone git@github.com:ACME-Climate/PreAndPostProcessingScripts.git
the script is located in the repository at:
utils/quick_and_dirty_cf_compliance_checker
Usage:
Alternate checker (yet to be evaluated)
An alternate compliance checker is available here https://bitbucket.org/mde_/cfchecker. It appears to be much more portable. The two checkers sometimes provide identify different issues. We will try it and update this page after evaluating it.
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