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There are many ways to represent the same information in any general-purpose data model. Choices left up to the user in the case of netCDF include which information to represent as variables or as variable attributes; what names to choose for variables, dimensions, and attributes; what order to use for the dimensions of multidimensional variables; what variables to include in the same netCDF file; and how to use variable attributes to capture the structure and meaning of data. We provide some guidelines in the NetCDF User's Guide (See section Differences between Attributes and Variables), but we've found that a little experience helps. Occasionally we have decided it was useful to change the structure of netCDF files after experience with how the data is used.
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