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The purpose of the Network Common Data Form (netCDF)
interface is to allow you to create, access, and share array-oriented data in
a form that is self-describing and network-transparent. "Self-describing"
means that a file includes information defining the data it contains. "Network-transparent"
means that a file is represented in a form that can be accessed by computers
with different ways of storing integers, characters, and floating-point numbers.
Using the netCDF interface for creating new datasets makes the data portable.
Using the netCDF interface in software for data access, management, analysis,
and display can make the software more generally useful.
The netCDF software
includes C and FORTRAN interfaces for accessing netCDF data. These libraries
are available for many common computing platforms. C++ and perl interfaces for
netCDF data access are also available from Unidata. The community of netCDF
users has contributed ports of the software to additional platforms and interfaces
for other programming languages as well. Source code for netCDF software libraries
is freely available to encourage the sharing of both array-oriented data and
the software that makes the data useful.
This User's
Guide presents the netCDF data model, but documents only the C and FORTRAN interfaces.
Separate documents are available for C++ and
perl interfaces.
Reference documentation for UNIX systems, in the form of UNIX `man' pages
for the C and FORTRAN interfaces, is available with the netCDF software. Extensive
additional information about netCDF, including pointers to other software that
works with netCDF data, is available at the netCDF World Wide Web site
(`http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/').
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