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.
Dear NetCDF-Group,we have been working on NetCDF external link functionality. This allows NetCDF applications to create dimension variables which values are stored in an external file. Therefore, it uses the HDF5 virtual dataset (VDS) functionality. This is useful for, e.g., climate applications that rely on a variable per file and timestep configuration. The idea is to store the grid in a separate file and link our data to this grid. We already have our first working version. You find the patch and the examples on our page:
http://wr.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/research/projects/bullio/netcdf_external_links/startUnder the hood it uses HDF5 virtual datasets. VDS has the advantage of being compatible to the functions that are supported by oridinary datasets. Therefore, files containing VDS should be supported by the most software.
There is a minor issue related to HDF5, the call H5F_try_close function fails, when ncdump trys to read data from an external dimension. So far we found a workaround, but we will fix this issue.
It would be great if external link functionality could be supported by netCDF at some timepoint. We would like to improve our patch and for that reason we need your feedback. If you have some idea to the issue above, we would be grateful for each hint.
Regards, Eugen
netcdfgroup archives: