Scientific data formats such as NetCDF have made great strides in areas like interoperability, scalability, and data compression. By comparison, methods for representing the uncertainty inherent in the values stored in scientific data sets are less robust. A group organized by researchers from the National Research Council of Italy's Institute for Atmospheric Pollution Research is trying to address this issue by creating a set of conventions for the representation of uncertainty values associated with data stored in NetCDF files.

A discussion paper describing ideas for storing uncertainty values is available, and an electronic mail list has been created to allow broad community discussion of the proposal.

Version 4.2.3 of the netCDF Operators (NCO) has been released. NCO is an Open Source package that consists of a dozen standalone, command-line programs that take netCDF files as input, then operate (e.g., derive new data, average, print, hyperslab, manipulate metadata) and output the results to screen or files in text, binary, or netCDF formats.

Version 4.2.2 of the netCDF Operators (NCO) has been released. NCO is an Open Source package that consists of a dozen standalone, command-line programs that take netCDF files as input, then operate (e.g., derive new data, average, print, hyperslab, manipulate metadata) and output the results to screen or files in text, binary, or netCDF formats.

The Open Geospatial Consortium membership has approved the Enhanced Data Model Extension to the OGC Network Common Data Form (netCDF) Core Encoding Standard. The OGC has previously approved the netCDF Core Encoding Standard, the netCDF Binary Encoding Extension Standard-netCDF Classic, and the 64-bit Offset Format. All of the OGC's netCDF standards documents are available for free download from the OGC network Common Data Forum (netCDF) standards suite page.

Unidata Program Center developer John Caron has been thinking a lot about HDF5's Dimension Scales, how they relate to netCDF's Shared Dimensions, and why data should be written with the netCDF-4 library using Shared Dimensions.

If you like that sort of thing, read on.

Version 4.2.1 of the netCDF Operators (NCO) has been released. NCO is an Open Source package that consists of a dozen standalone, command-line programs that take netCDF files as input, then operate (e.g., derive new data, average, print, hyperslab, manipulate metadata) and output the results to screen or files in text, binary, or netCDF formats.

The Unidata netCDF group announces the 4.2.1.1 release of the netCDF C libraries. Version 4.2.1.1 includes fixes for two problems found in version 4.2.1 that we regarded as serious enough to warrant this interim release:

• A DAP performance bug in remotely accessing large files (> 2GiB) that also results in an incorrect error message on close
• An ncdump bug in CDL output for netCDF-4 string data containing characters that need to be escaped (e.g. newlines, tabs, quotes)

The Unidata netCDF group is pleased to announce the 4.2.1 release of the netCDF C libraries:

This release contains two important new features as well as performance enhancements, bug fixes, and documentation improvements. It is designed to be compatible with existing netCDF data and software.

Version 4.2.0 of the netCDF Operators (NCO) has been released. NCO is an Open Source package that consists of a dozen standalone, command-line programs that take netCDF files as input, then operate (e.g., derive new data, average, print, hyperslab, manipulate metadata) and output the results to screen or files in text, binary, or netCDF formats.

The Open Geospatial Consortium membership is seeking comments on an OGC candidate standard, the Network Common Data Form (netCDF) Enhanced Data Model Extension Encoding Standard.