Question about how to create a CF convention

[leilanepassos]

Question

Recently, I came across to a CF convention to marine-mammals data. I'm working in a new product of marine data collected by cormorant birds. I would like to know if it's possible to create a CF convention for tagged birds data.

[davidhassell]

Hello @leilanepassos

I think that this type of data would be well catered by Discrete Sampling Geometry (DSG) Trajectory data. A Tractory is defined here as "a series of data points along a path through space with time values in strict monotonically increasing order", and there are good examples here, which include examples for storing multiple trajectories in the same file.

I found this nice image in https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EO163427

... assuming that's your case then each dive would be a single trajectory, and multiple dives are easily stored in a single dataset following the Contiguous ragged array representation of trajectories example, which allows foe each trajectory feature (i.e. dive) to have a different number of elements whilst keep the dataset size in bytes to a minimum.

Does any of this match your use case?

Thanks,
David