What standard name to use in the context of astronomic related meteorological stations

[miniwark]

Question

Hi,

for an in-house project, in the context of astronomical observations, i am planing to follow as much as possible the CF standard names for:

• database column names
• internal coding
• JSON/Parquet files fields

We use specialized meteorological stations in the context of astronomy studies. And most of this stations have features to quickly close the astronomical instruments in case of rain / hail / lightning / to much wind / humidity...
(this things do not like water & wind).

For most of the standard name this is trivial (air_presure, air temperature, relative_humidity...) but there is some stuff for witch i need help.

Sky Temperature

As defined by ISO 9488 section 3.2.39.

'Sky temperature' is the common name used in the field, but i do feel than it may be the same thing as 'Brightness temperature'.

• can you confirm (or not) if it's indeed the same thing ?
• if it's the case, can it be a subject of an alias proposal ?

Electric Field

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_field

We measure this, because it can be used to anticipate storms , lightnings, heavy wind and rain.

• i did not find a corresponding name, is there one ?
• if not, is it subject to proposal ?

Boolean status (True / False)

We track things like "is it raining ?" or "is there a lightning impact?" without counting the quantity. One drop of water, or a lightning 100 Km away are enough to be "True" without measuring the exact quantity.

But i have difficulty to select the right name for this sort of discrete events, for example, for a nearby lightning impact, i am not sure if the correct name is it :

• lightning_strike
• lightning_strike_flag
• lightning_strike_status
• lightning_strike_status_flag
• something else ?
  The value can only be True or False or Null, and i would like to avoid to use and additional describing field.

(English is not my native language, and this probably the origin of my doubts for this point)

Thank you :-)

[JonathanGregory]

@miniwark

Thank for your questions, and sincere apologies that they have gone so long unaswered. We have not had enough people to answer standard names questions in recent months.

Sky temperature

Brightness temperature is the temperature of a hypothetical blackbody emitting the same power per unit solid angle, and it can be a function of wavelength or frequency. We have various standard names for brightness temperature e.g. toa_brightness_temperature, surface_brightness_temperature. You could propose adding a standard name for sky_brightness_temperature, if that's what it is. Is it calculated from a particular wavelength, or a range of wavelengths, or all wavelengths?

Electric field

You're right, we don't have a standard name for this, because it's not been requested before. If you measure it near the ground, perhaps an appropriate standard name would be surface_downward_electric_field_strength_in_air (in V m-1), or _upward_, depending on what sign convention you use.

Boolean status

There are standard names for various "binary masks" e.g. cloud_binary_mask, which are a similar idea. Those can be either 0 or 1 e.g. no cloud, or some cloud (of any amount, however small, by default). When you say the values could be True, False or Null do you mean string values (since netCDF doesn't have a Boolean data type)? For a binary mask, you'd encode "Null" as missing data. Would that approach be suitable for you? For such quantities to be useful, I assume they have to apply to a specified area and interval of time. If they apply to all space and time, the value must always be 1!

Best wishes

Jonathan