I suggest you store it as Dave Allured says, with dimensions
(time, ID). This is often called an "unstructured grid".
NCO has no problem subsetting data on unstructured grids,
where lon(ID) and lat(ID) are known as auxiliary coordinate
variables. Just use
ncks -X lon_min,lon_max,lat_min,lat_max -X ....
It's all in the manual, which has an index that points to
examples of using unstructured grids and their proper CF
formatting.
Charlie
--
Charlie Zender, Earth System Sci. & Computer Sci.
University of California, Irvine 949-891-2429 )'(
