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Re: 961218: netCDF to ARC/INFO conversion

>From: Doug Nebert <address@hidden>
>cc: address@hidden
>Subject: Searching for conversions
>Organization: Federal Geographic Data Committee
>Keywords: 199612181259.KAA28212 netCDF ARC/INFO

Hi Doug,

> I have been using the ARC/INFO geographic information system from ESRI
> for many years and am aware of countless spatial data sets that are
> available or produced in this system.  Ironically the GIS users tend not
> to be the visualizers in the climate, weather, and other modeling
> fields.  Consequently, it looks like there is no ready conversion from
> an ARC/INFO data set into the widely-used netCDF format.
> 
> Are you aware of any converters to take ARC/INFO data to or from netCDF
> as 2-D line graphics or as gridded "image" data (both data types are
> supported in the GIS), or would a filter need to be written?
> 
> This would be a nice utility to provide cartorgaphic "background"
> information for modelers by harvesting existing ARC/INFO data.

I'm not aware of any converters between ARC/INFO and netCDF.

The netCDF data model may not be rich enough to represent arbitrary
ARC/INFO data, especially if the latter uses nested data structures or
requires multiple unlimited dimensions.  I think it would be possible to
develop conventions for representing static ARC/INFO data using netCDF,
but supporting efficient updates might be difficult, e.g. adding the
data for new county outlines to an existing file.

You might want to pose your question to the address@hidden
mailing list.  This reaches hundreds of netCDF users, and someone else
may know of some work in this area of which I'm not aware.

--Russ

_____________________________________________________________________

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