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Re: DRS and CDMS information

Bob,

Thanks for sending the information about the 'cdunif' library.  It looks
very useful, and I like the interface.

When it's released, I think it would be worthwhile including a brief
description of 'cdunif' in our document listing netCDF-related software at

    http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/utilities.html

It also looks like a quick way to write a GRIB-to-netCDF converter would be
to use the 'cdunif' library to read the GRIB data and the corresponding
netCDF functions to write the data, assuming a GrADS control file was
available.  I'd be interested in looking into this approach some time.  I'm
not familiar enough with the workings of GrADS to know how difficult it
would be to construct a GrADS control file for a set of GRIB products, or
whether it would be necessary to use GrADS to do this.

> The 'cdunif' library developed by PCMDI currently provides read-only
> access to DRS, netCDF, and data formats accessible via GrADS (including
> GRIB) through a uniform interface. It is the I/O interface for the VCS
> visualization package, as well as our CDMS database system under
> development. We also plan to add HDF as soon as possible. cdunif is
> modeled after the netCDF interface, and is written entirely in C.
> Porting has been fairly straightforward; we've ported to SGI Irix
> 5.3, HP/UX 9.0, Sun 4.1.X, and Sun/Solaris (2.3 and 2.4), and plan to
> port to Cray Unicos as well.
> 
> As the initial version of cdunif was just completed, it hasn't been
> released as a separate package; however, if there is sufficient
> interest I would like to do so. A man page is included below, which
> will give you a better understanding of the library.

I expect there might be sufficient interest to justify the release.  Though
I don't know how much DRS is used outside LLNL, the interest in GRIB and
netCDF continues to grow, and I've had several inquiries about ways to
handle data in both formats and to convert between them.  I also understand
there has recently been a discussion (debate?) going on in the GrADS mailing
list about the desirability and practicality of GrADS access to netCDF
files.  I'm not on the list, so I just have a couple of messages forwarded
to me by John Sheldon.  It seems as if the existence of the 'cdunif' package
would be of interest to at least some of the participants in that
discussion, if they don't already know about it:

    Keith Searight <address@hidden>, NOAA/CDC
    John Sheldon <address@hidden>, NOAA/GFDL
    Mike Fiorino <address@hidden>, LLNL

Anyway, thanks for the information, and I'd like to be kept informed about
cdunif and any other netCDF-related packages you know about.

--Russ

______________________________________________________________________________

Russ Rew                                           UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                              http://www.unidata.ucar.edu