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One of the primary reasons for using the netCDF interface for both
scientific data and applications that deal with scientific data is to
take advantage of higher-level netCDF operations and generic
applications for processing netCDF files. NetCDF operators read
one or more netCDF input files and write a netCDF output file. NetCDF
utilities read one or more netCDF files and produce some other
kind of output (e.g. a text file or graphics), or read some other kind
of input (e.g. a text file) and write netCDF files. Currently two
netCDF utilities are available as part of the netCDF software
distribution: ncgen and ncdump. A preliminary set of
example netCDF operators is available as a separate package.
This chapter describes the ncgen and ncdump utilities.
These two tools convert between binary netCDF files and an ASCII
representation of netCDF files. The output of ncdump and the
input to ncgen is an ASCII description of a netCDF file in a tiny
language known as CDL (network Common data form Description Language).
The preliminary set of example netCDF operators is available via
anonymous FTP of the file pub/sdm/ncopers<version>.tar.Z from
host unidata.ucar.edu. The programs include: ncextr,
which extracts a subset of variables from a netCDF file into an output
netCDF file; ncstat, which reads a netCDF file and writes
selected statistics along one or more summary dimensions into another
netCDF file; and ncbarne, which performs a Barnes objective
analysis of raw data contained in a netCDF file and writes the result to
an output netCDF file. These programs are documented in the ncopers
release.
A number of freely-available and commercial software packages are also
available for manipulating or graphically displaying netCDF data. A
list of these packages is maintained in the file
pub/netcdf/utilities.txt from host unidata.ucar.edu.
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