Supporting Open Science with the CF Metadata Conventions for NetCDF

Abstract:  The CF (Climate and Forecast) Conventions are a community-developed standard that promotes the sharing and automated processing of Earth systems science data in the netCDF data format (and in Zarr/GeoZarr). The CF conventions define metadata that can be used to describe the coordinate systems, data structure, and geophysical meaning and units of each variable. This enables users of data from different sources to decide which quantities are comparable and facilitates building applications with powerful extraction, analysis, and display capabilities. There is a mature and growing ecosystem of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and commercial software tools which work with CF.

The CF standard has been essential to the success of high-profile internationally-coordinated modeling activities (e.g, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, which hosts more than 30 million files and more than 15 petabytes of data, all compliant with CF). CF is widely used by weather, climate, ocean and Earth observation scientists, and is gaining traction among others, such as the biogeochemistry and atmospheric chemistry communities.