Summer of Code 2006 Project: 

_CF Metadata Conventions for NCO Software_

The netCDF Operators (NCO, http://nco.sf.net) are a GPL'd scientific
data analysis toolkit widely used in the geosciences.
The Climate and Forecast (CF) metdata conventions provide a framework
for indicating complex data attributes such as geophysical grids and
processing history in netCDF datasets
(http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cms/eaton/cf-metadata).
However, it is difficult to exploit the utility of CF-compliant
datasets since the full CF standard is not implemented in generic data 
processing toolkits since doing so would be very complex.
We propose a Summer of Code project to implement key CF parts in NCO.

Specifically, the interested student will implement and propagate CF
metadata conventions for 
1. Missing data (CF convention Section 2.5.1) 
   http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cms/eaton/cf-metadata/CF-1.0.html#miss
2. Cell methods (Section 7.1)
   http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cms/eaton/cf-metadata/CF-1.0.html#bnds
3. Compression by Gathering (Section 8.2) (time permitting)
   http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cms/eaton/cf-metadata/CF-1.0.html#gath
Tasks 1 and 2 can be accomplished within the eight week SOC period by
a motivated student proficient in C and the GNU/GCC toolchain. 
The student will modify state-of-the-art scientific software 
which runs in cross-platform high performance computing environments.

The advisor for this project is:

Professor Charlie Zender <zender@uci.edu>
Department of Earth System Science
University of California at Irvine
http://www.ess.uci.edu/~zender