The CF Metadata Conventions
The CF Metadata Conventions (“CF” henceforth) are being developed by academics and practitioners in the climate and forecasting field, with the objective to facilitate interoperability between data producers and data consumers (whether human or computer systems).
Reading the CF documentation can be a daunting task because it is written as a standards document, and not as a guideline or tutorial for people who want to understand the concept and the structure but who are not looking for all of the low-level detail.
This vignette presents a view of CF from the perspective of R. The main elements of CF are introduced in terms that should be easily understood by anyone who has worked with matrices and arrays in R.
By definition, a CF-compliant data set is stored in a netCDF file. The CF elements and their relationship to the building blocks of the netCDF file are given in the figure below:
At the end of this vignette is a feature matrix that indicates the
support for each CF element in package ncdfCF.