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Latest update March 14, 2012.
You can use the following shorthand http://bit.ly/ugrid_cf to refer to this page.
PLEASE NOTE: The title of this page suggests that this is only a proposal by Deltares. However, the support for this proposal is already much wider than that (see the UGRID Google Group) and is under active discussion with an important subset of the CF community. We keep the current title only such that it does not break any existing external links to this information.
Introduction.
This page describes a proposal for storing unstructured (or flexible mesh) model data in a netCDF file. Our focus is on data for environmental applications and hence we start from the CF-conventions which has been the standard in climate research for many years, and is increasingly adopted by others as the metadata standard for netCDF, see e.g. NASA Standards Process Group and OGC. The CF conventions allow you to define values at points, and the associated coordinates may have bounds attributes to indicate a spatial extent bigger than a single point. A two-dimensional array of points, encodes a structured topology but the CF conventions do not yet provide the means to define an unstructured topology. That's what this proposal adds.
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