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Many existing software applications can read and manipulate netCDF files. Before writing your own program, check to see if any existing programs meet your needs.
Two utilities come with the netCDF distribution: ncdump and ncgen. The ncdump command reads a netCDF file and outputs ASCII in a format called CDL. The ncgen command reads an ASCII file in CDL format, and generates a netCDF data file.
One common use for ncdump is to examine the metadata of a netCDF file, to see what it contains. At the beginning of each example in this tutorial, an ncdump of the resulting data file is shown. See simple_xy.
In the netCDF-4.0 beta release, the ncdump and ncgen tools cannot yet handle the new netCDF-4 features of groups, user-defined types, or the new atomic types which were introduced in netCDF-4 (like 64-bit integer types). These tools can handle netCDF-4/HDF5 files which don't use these features.
A future release of netCDF will include the updated version of these tools to fully handle netCDF-4 advanced features.
For more information about ncdump and ncgen see NetCDF Utilities (The NetCDF Users Guide).
The following general-purpose tools have been found to be useful in many situations. Some of the tools on this list are developed at Unidata. The others are developed elsewhere, and we can make no guarantees about their continued availability or success. All of these tools are open-source.
| UDUNITS | Unidata library to help with scientific units. | http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/udunits
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| IDV | Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer, a 3D visualization and analysis package (Java based). | http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv
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| NCL | NCAR Command Language, a graphics and data manipulation package. | http://www.ncl.ucar.edu
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| GrADS | The Grid Analysis and Display System package. | http://grads.iges.org/grads/grads.html
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| NCO | NetCDF Command line Operators, tools to manipulate netCDF files. | http://nco.sourceforge.net
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For a list of netCDF tools that we know about see http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/software.html. If you know of any that should be added to this list, send email to support@unidata.ucar.edu.
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