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Re: my annual netCDF question ...

Hi Dennis,

> What is the status on netCDF and packing?

I have to sheepishly admit that we haven't worked on it since the last
time you asked.  Our plans are still to implement the next version of a
netCDF format in terms of the HDF 5 format and thus leverage the support
available for packing in HDF 5, but we didn't get all the resources we
requested in our last NSF proposal, and as a result have had to put
some of our development plans on the back burner.  HDF 1.0.0 was just
announced today, so I suppose we could start looking at this, but lately
we have been concentrating our limited resources on providing an
implementation of netCDF for Java.

Bill Noon (Cornell University) has implemented some modifications to the
netCDF library resulting in a netCDF variation that provides mostly
transparent compression of netCDF files.  This package is being used
extensively by the Regional Climate Centers.  For more information on
this, see

   http://snow.cit.cornell.edu/noon/z_netcdf.html

or look up "znetcdf" or "zlib" in the search forms at the bottom of the
netCDF home page

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

> -------------------------------------------

> Also, I have been asked to comment on a report of the
>  "US Modeling Infrastructure Wkshop"
 
>  One sentence has me perplexed. I think it is not correct.
 
>  "There probably is not a netCDF format for dealing with
>   ungridded data."
  
>  Perhaps, they mean standard [eg, coordinate order] for
>  ungridded data (station data?).

You're right, it's not correct.  For example, AWIPS uses netCDF files
internally to store hourly METARs.  We also have decoders that write
other kinds of station data into netCDF files.  The data could be stored
in order by stations, but we just store it in the order the reports
arrive.

--Russ