Due to the current gap in continued funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the NSF Unidata Program Center has temporarily paused most operations. See NSF Unidata Pause in Most Operations for details.
Due to the current gap in continued funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the NSF Unidata Program Center has temporarily paused most operations. See NSF Unidata Pause in Most Operations for details.
Hi, On the September Unidata community survey, in answer to Question 21: If you have any suggestions or comments regarding Unidata Data Management tools, please enter them below (e.g. enhancement or future services): a user commented This isn't Unidata's issue per se, but we need to converge on a method of handling irregularly gridded (e.g., FEM) data within netCDF and CDM. We share this user's desire for a way to store and access irregularly gridded data that could be represented within the netCDF data model and the Common Data Model. Unidata has participated in several efforts to address this issue. Back in 2006, NOAA and Unidata held a workshop with a goal to develop community standards for unstructured grids http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/events/2006GridWorkshop/index.html Two results of that workshop were a small working group exploring options for representing unstructured grids that might be proposed for the CF Conventions https://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/trac/ticket/6 https://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/trac/ticket/7 and UGRID, still under development, considered a leading candidate for an unstructured data model built on the netCDF classic data model. There is currently a Google Group on UGRID Interoperability that is moving the UGRID proposal forward. According to a developer who is a member of that group, NOAA's IOOS is funding a modeling testbed to implement things like subsetting and interpolation of unstructured grids inside of netCDF-Java. In an unrelated effort, EXODUS II http://sourceforge.net/projects/exodusii/ is a finite element model that uses netCDF for its finite element grids. To handle larger meshes, it requires raising the current limits significantly on the number of dimensions and variables per file (to 65536 and 524288, respectively!). The NSF-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative has also published drafts that mention netCDF and DAP representations for unstructured grids. Currently, netCDF lacks resources and expertise to help directly with any of these efforts, but would be interested in hearing about progress and other approaches for representing unstructured grids. --Russ
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