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