Updates from the 2025 CF Workshop

Poster presented on 16 December 2025 at the AGU Annual Meeting to the "Evolving Science Commons - 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 more recently 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 are encoded using the CF Conventions. This presentation will provide a high-level overview of CF, including governance and the CF data model, and review discussions and outcomes from the 2025 CF Workshop held virtually 22-25 September 2025. These discussions included how CF should evolve in terms of representing discovery metadata and provenance, vocabulary management, support for localized metadata, and use in machine learning models.