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5 NetCDF Utilities

One of the primary reasons for using the netCDF interface for applications that deal with arrays is to take advantage of higher-level netCDF utilities and generic applications for netCDF data. Currently two netCDF utilities are available as part of the netCDF software distribution:

ncdump

reads a netCDF dataset and prints a textual representation of the information in the dataset

ncgen

reads a textual representation of a netCDF dataset and generates the corresponding binary netCDF file or a C or FORTRAN program to create the netCDF dataset

Two more general-purpose netCDF utilities are available as part of the FAN (File Array Notation) package:

ncmeta

prints selected metadata from one or more netCDF datasets

ncrob

performs various operations (copy, sum, mean, max, min, ...) with data read from and printed or written to text files and/or selected parts of netCDF variables or attributes.

For more information on FAN, see http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdffan_utils.html.

Users have contributed other netCDF utilities, and various visualization and analysis packages are available that access netCDF data. For an up-to-date list of freely-available and commercial software that can access or manipulate netCDF data, see the NetCDF Software list, http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdfsoftware.html.

This chapter describes the ncgen and ncdump utilities. These two tools convert between binary netCDF datasets and a text representation of netCDF datasets. The output of ncdump and the input to ncgen is a text description of a netCDF dataset in a tiny language known as CDL (network Common data form Description Language).

• CDL Syntax: Creating a File without Code
• CDL Data Types: Describing Types in CDL
• CDL Constants: Constant Values in CDL
• ncgen: Turning CDL into Data Files
• ncdump: Turning Data Files into CDL (or XML)

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