/ugrid-conventions

Unstructured Grid (UGRID) Conventions

MIT LicenseMIT

UGRID Conventions

Build Status

Overview

This document is a standard for storing unstructured grid (a.k.a. unstructured mesh, flexible mesh) model data in a Unidata Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) file.

Note: NetCDF files using this convention can be be given the global attribute Conventions = 'CF-1.6, UGRID-1.0' if they are CF- and UGRID-compliant, or just Conventions = 'UGRID-1.0' if they are not CF-compliant.

The standard was developed over a period of several years through the UGRID Google Group which had members from many different unstructured grid modeling communities (including SELFE, ELCIRC, FVCOM, ADCIRC). From these discussions Bert Jagers (Deltares) created the first draft of this document. We will likely propose this as a CF Standard once it has been fully tested by the community.

Contributors

People who have contributed to this standard:

  • Bert Jagers
  • David Stuebe
  • Tom Gross
  • Chris Barker
  • Brian Zelenke
  • Rich Signell
  • Bob Oehmke
  • Alex Crosby
  • Karen Schuchardt
  • David Ham
  • Brian Blanton
  • Cristina Forbes
  • Charles Seaton
  • Dave Forrest
  • Bill Howe
  • Geoff Cowles
  • Phil Elson

Contributing to UGRID

The UGRID conventions are developed in public at https://github.com/ugrid-conventions/ugrid-conventions. Anybody is welcome to contribute using the common open-source GitHub workflow (fork and branch).

The definitive source of the conventions can be found in the src directory in the master branch. To generate the HTML from of the conventions, mkdocs is used. The requirements.txt file in the UGRID repository is the recommended approach to installing the necessary tools:

$ pip install --file requirements.txt

The docs are then built using standard mkdocs commands. For example, the following command will build the conventions pages and place them in a directory called _site:

$ mkdocs build -f mkdocs.yml