CF Metadata Conventions
Published December 17, 2025 | Version 1.13
Standard Open

NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Conventions

Authors/Creators

  • 1. NCAR
  • 2. University of Reading and UK Met Office Hadley Centre
  • 3. PCMDI, LLNL
  • 4. PMEL, NOAA
  • 5. Unidata
  • 6. USGS
  • 7. UK Met Office
  • 8. MIT
  • 9. DKRZ
  • 10. NCAS and CEDA
  • 11. NCAS
  • 12. SMHI
  • 13. University of Reading
  • 14. Excalibur Laboratories Inc
  • 15. University of Texas
  • 16. University of California, Irvine
  • 17. EUMETSAT
  • 18. NCAS and University of Reading
  • 19. Corteva Agriscience
  • 20. Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
  • 21. NOAA/CIRES/University of Colorado
  • 22. HDF Group
  • 23. OceanDataLab
  • 24. Puertos del Estado, Madrid
  • 25. SMHI Rossby Centre, Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute
  • 26. NOAA
  • 27. National Centre for Atmospheric Science and University of Reading
  • 28. ROR icon Norwegian Meteorological Institute
  • 29. ROR icon National Centre for Atmospheric Science
  • 30. ROR icon Science and Technology Facilities Council
  • 31. ROR icon Instituto de Física de Cantabria
  • 32. ROR icon Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
  • 33. ROR icon Universidad de Cantabria
  • 34. ROR icon NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research
  • 35. Independent consultant

Description

This document describes the CF conventions for climate and forecast metadata designed to promote the processing and sharing of files created with the netCDF Application Programmer Interface. The conventions define metadata that provide a definitive description of what the data in each variable represents, and of the spatial and temporal properties of the data. This enables users of data from different sources to decide which quantities are comparable, and facilitates building applications with powerful extraction, regridding, and display capabilities.

The CF conventions generalize and extend the COARDS conventions. The extensions include metadata that provides a precise definition of each variable via specification of a standard name, describes the vertical locations corresponding to dimensionless vertical coordinate values, and provides the spatial coordinates of non-rectilinear gridded data. Since climate and forecast data are often not simply representative of points in space/time, other extensions provide for the description of coordinate intervals, multidimensional cells and climatological time coordinates, and indicate how a data value is representative of an interval or cell. This standard also relaxes the COARDS constraints on dimension order and specifies methods for reducing the size of datasets.

Files

cf-conventions.pdf

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Additional details

Is derived from
Standard: https://github.com/cf-convention/cf-conventions/tree/v1.13.0 (URL)
Is documented by
Standard: https://cfconventions.org/ (URL)
Is identical to
Standard: https://cfconventions.org/Data/cf-conventions/cf-conventions-1.13/cf-conventions.html (URL)
Standard: https://cfconventions.org/Data/cf-conventions/cf-conventions-1.13/cf-conventions.pdf (URL)
Standard: https://cfconventions.org/Data/cf-documents/requirements-recommendations/conformance-1.13.html (URL)
Standard: https://cfconventions.org/Data/cf-documents/requirements-recommendations/conformance-1.13.pdf (URL)