[esip-semantictech] NASA GCMD Keywords Version 9.0 Released (2019-11-12)

[Mcgibbney, Lewis J (172B)]

Hi Tyler,
    
> Regarding the measurement keywords, the EOSDIS data centers needed a more fine-grained list of specific measurements (e.g.atmosphere_absorption_optical_thickness_due_to_black_carbon_ambient_aerosol_at_532nm) than the science keywords offered.

It appears to me that the correct place for this is in the CF Conventions... which has a hugely active community for exactly this kind of thing. Actually, if you look at the current CFConventions standard name table, you can already find atmosphere_absorption_optical_thickness_due_to_black_carbon_ambient_aerosol... try it out
http://cfconventions.org/Data/cf-standard-names/70/build/cf-standard-name-table.html

> The recommendation for this was put forward in an ESO review

This is concerning

> approved by ESDIS, 

This is even more concerning... why wasn't guidance issued to use CFConventions?

> and there is a preliminary list of 100 measurements. 

... there are thousands of existing, well defined variables measured in CFConventions. Why start a new list in GCMD?

> We plan to put forward additional measurement keywords in an upcoming keyword release,  and we can add interested folks
    here in that review. The measurement keywords specifically support the NASA UMM Variables Model (UMM-Var) evolution which has a field called 'MeasurementName' that  allows metadata curators to provide community sourced names to further describe variable
    data.

I understand that other variable names can be used in UMM, namely CFConventions. Thanks for pointing that out.

Lewis