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2008 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > Best Practices

8.5 Calendar Date and Time
Represent calendar dates and times with standards and conventions.

Two strategies for storing a date/time into a netCDF variable are:

  1. as a string using a standard encoding and calendar (e.g. ISO 8601), OK for a single date/time
  2. as a numeric value and a unit that includes the reference time, better for multiple times and makes it easier to compute differences between dates

Unidata's udunits package provides a convenient way to implement the second strategy.

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Previous: Strings and Character Variables Next: Packed Data Values Table of contents Frames User guide
2008 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > Best Practices