1.6 Is NetCDF a Good Archive Format?
NetCDF classic or 64-bit offset formats can be used as a
general-purpose archive format for storing arrays. Compression of data
is possible with netCDF (e.g., using arrays of eight-bit or 16-bit
integers to encode low-resolution floating-point numbers instead of
arrays of 32-bit numbers), or the resulting data file may be
compressed before storage (but must be uncompressed before it is
read). Hence, using these netCDF formats may require more space than
special-purpose archive formats that exploit knowledge of particular
characteristics of specific datasets.
With netCDF-4/HDF5 format, the zlib library can provide compression on
a per-variable basis. That is, some variables may be compressed,
others not. In this case the compression and decompression of data
happen transparently to the user, and the data may be stored, read,
and written compressed.
