The NetCDF Users Guide

Summary

Introduction

• The NetCDF Interface
• The netCDF File Format
• What about Performance?
• Is NetCDF a Good Archive Format?
• Attribute Conventions
• Background and Evolution of the NetCDF Interface
• Limitations of NetCDF

Components of a NetCDF Data Set

• The Data Model
• Dimensions
• Variables
• Coordinate Variables
• Attributes
• Differences between Attributes and Variables

Data

• External Data Types
• Data Structures in Classic and 64-bit Offset Files
• User Defined Types
• Type Conversion
• Data Access
• The Remote Data Access Client
• Type Conversion

File Structure and Performance

• Parts of a NetCDF Classic File
• Parts of a NetCDF-4 HDF5 File
• The Extended XDR Layer
• Large File Support
• NetCDF 64-bit Offset Format Limitations
• NetCDF Classic Format Limitations
• The NetCDF-3 I/O Layer
• Parallel Access with NetCDF-4
• Interoperability with HDF5
• Creating Self-Describing Data conforming to Conventions
• DAP Support

Improving Performance with Chunking

• The Chunk Cache
• The Default Chunking Scheme in version 4.1
• The Default Chunking Scheme in version 4.0.1
• Chunking and Parallel I/O
• A Utility to Help Benchmark Results: bm_file

NetCDF Utilities

• CDL Syntax
• CDL Data Types
• CDL Notation for Data Constants
• ncgen
• ncdump
• nccopy
• ncgen3

File Format Specification

• The NetCDF Classic Format Specification
• Notes on Computing File Offsets
• Examples
• The 64-bit Offset Format
• The NetCDF-4 Format
• The NetCDF-4 Classic Model Format
• HDF4 SD Format