long names and standard names

[bnlawrence]

I admit to be being surprised that CMIP6 explicitly controls some variables to have explicit long_names AND standard_names, as does CORDEX. I somehow missed that as it happened.

Here, for example is one of the CMIP5 (!) formal examples:

float tas(time, lat, lon) ;
 tas:standard_name = "air_temperature" ;
 tas:long_name = "Near-Surface Air Temperature" ;
tas:comment = "comment from CMIP5 table: near-surface
(usually, 2 meter) air temperature." ;
 tas:units = "K" ;
 tas:original_name = "TS" ;
tas:history = "2010-04-21T21:05:23Z altered by CMOR: Treated
scalar dimension: \'height\'. Inverted axis: lat." ;
 tas:cell_methods = "time: mean" ;
 tas:cell_measures = "area: areacella" ; 

which is formally in the CMIP6 controlled vocabularies as:

!============
variable_entry:    tas
!============
modeling_realm:    atmos
!----------------------------------
! Variable attributes:
!----------------------------------
standard_name:     air_temperature
units:             K
cell_methods:      time: mean
cell_measures:     area: areacella
long_name:         Near-Surface Air Temperature
!----------------------------------

We have to decide whether we care about following the CMIP6 bindings of these variables (and whether or not we want to put the CMIP6 table names and variable names anywhere in our metadata). Given we won't have files and directories with those names, there still might be benefits in putting them in per variable metadata.

We might also want to save the stash long names directly, we could do that with something like a um_context attribute.

[bnlawrence]

Can we add things to stash2cf? Is stash2cf complete for all our variables? Does our client community want names like tas? Does our climate community care about cmip6 long names.

[grenville]

it was a strange decision to use long_name - they could have called it cmip_long_name and not stuffed us all up

[grenville]

I vote we leave our long_names (we're not out of cf-compliance by doing so) -- atmos, nemo, and cice all have non CMIP long_names