Of the 300 names in the draft CF standard name table published in January 2001, 146 are in the current table; the others were modified or withdrawn. Since the table was in draft form for a long time, it may be that some of the draft standard names not in the current table are already being used. If it would be inconvenient at this stage to make them obsolete, they could be maintained as aliases. Please send requests for aliases, and comments on the changes described here, to the CF metadata mailing list.

Systematic changes were made in response to comments received on the draft and are detailed below. Most of them are aimed at shortening the standard names or at using more familiar phraseology.

• The phrase flux_density used in physics for a flux per unit area (e.g. radiative flux density in W m-2) is not commonly used in meteorology and oceanography. flux_density has been replaced by flux and flux by transport.
• longwave_heat_flux and shortwave_heat_flux have been changed to longwave_flux and shortwave_flux.
• The phrase mass_flux (e.g. in precipitation_mass_flux) has been replaced by just flux in many cases.
• To avoid ambiguity, vertical net upward or downward radiative fluxes have net stated explicitly. For the non-net surface fluxes, the words incident, reflected and emitted used in the draft names have been replaced by the more usual downwelling and upwelling.
• rate_of_change_of has been replaced by tendency_of.
• soil_water has been replaced by soil_moisture.
• The components of atmosphere hybrid vertical coordinates have been removed, as they have no need for standard names.
• molar_fraction has been changed to mole_fraction.
• vapour has been respelled as vapor.
• Upper case has been translated to lower case.

In addition to these systematic changes, other alterations were made to add clarity or improve consistency. The "generic" names such as temperature were removed because it is always preferable to use a more precise standard name. The generic names are now listed in the guidelines for construction of standard names. A few other standard names were withdrawn because in the draft they were imprecise or their intended meaning is presently unknown. No current equivalent given for standard names which have been removed for either of these reasons.