Attention

Cate has become the ESA Climate Toolbox. This documentation is being discontinued. You can find the documentation on the ESA Climate Toolbox here.

13. Terminology

The following table Table 13.1 based on [RD-9] and [RD-10] lists some of the terms used in the CCI Toolbox user interfaces and throughout this documentation.

Table 13.1 CCI Toolbox Terminology

Term

CCI Toolbox Definition

ECV

Umbrella term for geophysical quantity/quantities associated with climate variation and change as well as the impact of climate change onto Earth (e.g. cloud properties).

ECV product

Subdivision of ECVs in long-term data record of values or fields, covering one or more geophysical quantities (e.g. Cloud Water Path).

Geophysical quantity

One physical parameter/variable in that constitutes a time series of observations (e.g. Cloud Liquid Water Path).

Dataset

In-memory representation of data opened from a data source. Contains multiple layers of a geophysical quantity or multiple geophysical quantities with multiple layers encompassing e.g. information on temporal and spatial dimensions and localization or uncertainty information.

Data product

Combination of dataset and geophysical quantity incl. uncertainty information (e.g. Cloud Liquid Water Path from L3S Modis merged phase1 v1.0 including uncertainty, standard deviation, number of observations, …)

Data store

Offers multiple data sources.

Data source

A concrete source for datasets. Provides the schema of datasets and other descriptive meta-information about a dataset such as it geo-spatial coverage. Used to open datasets.

Schema

Describes a dataset’s structure, contents and data types.