Update documentation

[tomvothecoder]

Description

• Closes [Doc]: Misc. updates #363

Checklist

• My code follows the style guidelines of this project
• I have performed a self-review of my own code
• My changes generate no new warnings
• Any dependent changes have been merged and published in downstream modules

If applicable:

• I have added tests that prove my fix is effective or that my feature works
• New and existing unit tests pass with my changes (locally and CI/CD build)
• I have commented my code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas
• I have made corresponding changes to the documentation
• I have noted that this is a breaking change for a major release (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to not work as expected)

[tomvothecoder]

Hey @chengzhuzhang and @pochedls, there is a section in our documentation that says we are striving for "Support for CF compliant, E3SM non-CF compliant, and common metadata". This line was taken from early in our requirements gathering days.

Can either of you clarify what E3SM non-CF compliant and common metadata are and if is still within scope to support them? So far xCDAT support has primarily been for CF compliant datasets and non-CF datasets with "months since ..." or "years since..." time units.

https://github.com/xCDAT/xcdat#things-we-are-striving-for

[chengzhuzhang]

Hey @tomvothecoder, E3SM output mostly follows CF-convention and we strive to convert non-compliant items when possible. I think we can rephrase it as: "Support for CF compliant, non-CF compliant but common metadata"?

[pochedls]

Hey @tomvothecoder, E3SM output mostly follows CF-convention and we strive to convert non-compliant items when possible. I think we can rephrase it as: "Support for CF compliant, non-CF compliant but common metadata"?

This sounds good to me. We might re-phrase to something like: "xcdat supports CF compliant datasets, but will also strive to support datasets with common non-CF compliant metadata."

[lee1043]

I like the way @pochedls rephrased!

[tomvothecoder]

Thanks for the feedback everyone! I followed Steve's rephrased description.