June,
I have struggled quite a bit with ArcGIS and netCDF myself. So far, two
options have worked for me:
1) directly use ArcGIS 9.2 to create a netCDF file. Starting with 9.2 (and
now in 9.3 beta) ArcGIS has had netCDF capabilities through the
"Multidimension Tools" toolbox. If using 9.2 and for some reason the
"raster to netCDF" tool crashes, it might be because your raster is too big.
That's a glitch that has been fixed in 9.3 beta.
2) note that ncdump is the opposite of ncgen. So, if you do:
ncdump myfile.nc > myfile.cdl
you will get a CDL file named myfile.cdl and can look into to see the CDL
syntax.
Then you can do:
ncgen -o myfile.nc myfile.cdl to recreate your original netcdf file.
So, doing that on various netCDF files should give you some hints about the
appropriate syntax.
I hope this helps,
Cedric
