If we have more than 60 seconds, we can subtract 60 and add one to the minutes digits. This is very similar to the previous example of three shorts and the base 60 for minutes and seconds. In this case, however, we see an additional use for this notation. In this case, the 360 means that degrees are calculated mod 360 and can always be brought within the range 0-360. When the less significant digit exceeds 86400000, the day digit can be incremented.
Further thought needs to be addressed to the utility of base arithmetic for floats and doubles.
This is a convention only which requires no changes to the netCDF package. It only requires additions to routines manipulating netCDF files if they are to work with these generalized conventions.