Hello everyone,
During the very good presentations of Julian and Sadie, questions were raised about validation of NetCDF data.
Some people pm me for further information on my comment so here we go.
Just to introduce myself, I'm working on the climate indices computation python library
Icclim which, for its newest version, will wrap it's sister library
Xclim.
Icclim is founded by IS-ENES, Xclim by Ouranos and both are open source.
In short, both library compute ECAD indices (
see PDF) and others climate indices with a different level of abstraction.
The ECAD specification also gives recommendations about the quality checks to validate netCDF files in chapter "Quality Control".
Here is a (very) short sample of what should be controlled:
daily maximum temperature TX:
. . . must exceed -90.0 ◦C
. . . must be less than 60.0 ◦C
. . . must exceed or equal daily minimum temperature (if exists)
There is currently some work going on in Xclim to run most of these ECAD checks.
However, this is still a work in progress !
The checks may become available though the Xclim CLI, so even if you don't care about climate indices the feature may still become available independently at some point.