CDO

Since CDO version 1.5.9 the operator setpartabn can be used to transform data and metadata via a parameter table.
The syntax is:

cdo setpartabn,mypartab ifile ofile

mypartab is an ASCII formatted file with a namelist for each to be changed parameter.

The current implemented namelist entries are:

Entry	Type	Description
name	word	original name of the variable
out_name	word	new name of the variable
type	word	data type (real or double)
standard_name	word	as defined in the CF standard name table
long_name	string	describing the variable
units	string	specifying the units for the variable
comment	string	providing clarifying information concerning the variable
cell_methods	string	typically providing information concerning calculation of means or climatologies
cell_measures	string	indicates the names of the variables containing cell areas and volumes.
missing_value	float	specifying how missing data will be identified
valid_min	float
valid_max	float
ok_min_mean_abs	float
ok_max_mean_abs	float

Here is an example of a parameter table for one variable:

&parameter
  name            = t
  out_name        = ta
  standard_name   = air_temperature
  units           = "K" 
  missing_value   = 1e+20
  valid_min       = 160
  valid_max       = 340
/

The name of the variable is t, it will be renamed to ta. The standard name will be set to air_temperature and the units will be set to "K" (converts the units if necessary). The missing value will be set to 1e+20. In addition it will be checked whether the values of the variable are in the range of 160 to 340.

The original CMOR parameter tables can be converted to the CDO parameter table format with the undocumented CDO operator conv_cmor_table. Here is an example to convert the CMOR CMIP5 table CMIP5_day to a CDO parameter table:

cdo conv_cmor_table,CMIP5_day > CMIP5_day.partab

To apply this table to a dataset use:

cdo setpartabn,CMIP5_day.partab  ifile  ofile