Updates from the 2024 CF Workshop

Poster presented on 11 December 2024 at the AGU Annual Meeting to the "Coping with the Data Deluge - Poster" session. Abstract:The CF (Climate and Forecast) Conventions are a community-developed standard for describing Earth system science data in the netCDF data format (and in Zarr/GeoZarr). The CF Conventions can encode information that describes the coordinate systems, data structure, and geophysical meaning and units of each variable, and how the data were collected. It is widely used by weather and climate scientists and remote-sensing researchers and is gaining traction in new communities, such as biogeochemistry and operational weather prediction. It has a mature ecosystem of FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) and commercial software tools that can explore, analyze, and visualize data that is encoded using the CF Conventions. This presentation will provide a high-level overview of CF, including the CF data model, and review discussions and outcomes from the 2024 CF Workshop held at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) in Norrköping, Sweden on 17-20 September 2024. These discussions included how CF should evolve in terms of representing uncertainties and provenance as well as support for localized metadata and use in machine learning models.