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Summary

The purpose of the Network Common Data Form (netCDF) interface is to allow you to create, access, and share scientific data in a form that is self-describing and network-transparent. "Self-describing" means that a file includes information defining the data it contains. "Network-transparent" means that a file is represented in a form that can be accessed by computers with different ways of storing integers, characters, and floating-point numbers. Using the netCDF interface for creating new scientific data sets can improve the accessibility of the data. Using the netCDF interface in new software for scientific data access, management, analysis, and display can improve the reusability of the software for other data sets and by other users.

The netCDF software provides common C and FORTRAN interfaces for applications and data. The C interface library is available for many common computing platforms, including various versions of UNIX, VMS, MSDOS and OS/2 environments. The FORTRAN interface, implemented in C, is available for many of the platforms on which the C interface is available. The form in which the FORTRAN interface is implemented makes it easy to generate and test a new FORTRAN interface for a new platform by specifying the conventions for calling C from FORTRAN. An experimental C++ prototype interface is currently under evaluation.

The netCDF software is being made freely available to encourage the sharing of both scientific data and the software that makes the data useful.

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