Recommendation:

We recommend that CF compliance of NASA-distributed HDF/netCDF files be verified.

Recommendation Details: The Climate and Forecast (CF) Conventions are widely employed guidelines for Earth Science data and metadata storage, which help tool developers find and/or interpret data values, coordinates, units, and measurements in data files. Thus, it is increasingly important to adhere to CF conventions in order to benefit from analysis tools, web services, and middleware that exploit them.

We recommend using (freely-available) checkers, such as cfchecker, NCO, the JPL Web-based Metadata Compliance Checker (MCC), or HDF Product Designer (HPD), to understand and mitigate the CF compliance of files employing either the classic or enhanced data models.