The fact that wide variety of WOCE data are in the same kind of data file means that you only need a single piece of software to read them all. For earlier versions of WOCE data you needed to know the structure of the files and needed a different piece of software or code to read each kind of data stream. In some data streams you even needed different code to read individual files! This problem has been removed with the use of netCDF.

NetCDF files should have the file name extension ".nc". The recommended extension for netCDF files was changed from ".cdf" to ".nc" in 1994 in order to avoid a clash with the NASA CDF file extension, and now it also avoids confusion with "Channel Definition Format" files.

Yes, the WOCE netCDF files conform to the international standards set by COARDS (Co-operative Ocean/Atmosphere Research Data Service), a USA-based co-operative for the sharing and distribution of global atmospheric and oceanographic research data sets.

Three routines have been created to make it easier to read and write pltgks netcdf files in fortran. To read a pltgks netcdf file you first call 'readinfd' to read the header information and then 'readat' to read the data. To write a pltgks netcdf file you call 'wrtdatd'. A description of the subroutines can be found at http://olympic.atmos.colostate.edu/software/rwpltgks.txt. Yes you can. A sample program showing and describing how it can be done is available at http://olympic.atmos.colostate.

NetCDF (network Common Data Form) is a set of interfaces for array-oriented data access and a freely-distributed collection of data access libraries for C, Fortran, C++, Java, and other languages. The netCDF libraries support a machine-independent format for representing scientific data. Together, the interfaces, libraries, and format support the creation, access, and sharing of scientific data. Portable.

No, we discourage users from making use of the new format unless they need it for very large files. It may be some time until third-party software that uses the netCDF library is upgraded to 3.6 or later versions that support the new large file facilities, so we advise continuing to use the classic netCDF format for data that doesn't require huge file offsets. The library makes this recommendation easy to follow, since the default for file creation is the classic format.

The netCDF mailing list has over 500 addresses (some of which are aliases to more addresses) in thirty countries. Several groups have adopted netCDF as a standard way to represent some forms of scientific data. A somewhat dated description of some of the projects and groups that have used netCDF is available from http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/usage.html.

Rew, R. K., G. P. Davis, S. Emmerson, and H. Davies, NetCDF User's Guide for C, An Interface for Data Access, Version 3, April 1997. Brown, S. A, M. Folk, G. Goucher, and R. Rew, "Software for Portable Scientific Data Management," Computers in Physics, American Institute of Physics, Vol. 7, No. 3, May/June 1993, pp. 304-308. Fulker, D. W.

The latest from the NetCDF stable series (version 3.6.0beta) is currently compiled and installed with all compilers.

The latest source distribution, which includes the C, Fortran, and C++ interfaces, is available for downloading as a compressed tar file or a gzipped tar file. Installation instructions are available with the distribution or online. The Java interface for netCDF is available separately from the NetCDF Java site. Binary distributions for some platforms are available from the directory ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/binary.

permit separate Fortran library, so installations may more easily support use of multiple Fortran compilers. changed the C++ interface to use only netCDF-3 interface instead of the older netCDF-2 interface, which means on-the-fly numeric conversions are supported using get methods in the C++ interface, for example you can get data of any numeric type as double. fixed file size inconsistencies that would occasionally result in gratuitous extra bytes at the end of a file.

The NetCDF Installation and Porting Guide explains how to build netCDF from source on various platforms. Often, it's as easy as running ./configure make test make install

Note that we have not ported the F90 or C++ APIs to the Windows platform, only the C and F77 APIs. User contributions of ports to F90 windows compilers are very welcome (send them to support-netcdf@unidata.ucar.edu). On windows, NetCDF consists of a DLL and the ncgen/ncdump executables. The easiest course is to download one of the pre-built DLLs and utilities and just install them on your system. If you want to use the Fortran API, you may use the pre-built 3.5.1 DLL release.

The netCDF installation directory can be set at the time configure is run using the --prefix argument. If it is not specified, /usr/local is used as the default prefix.

Starting with version 3.6.2, the netCDF can build shared libraries on platforms which support them, but by default netCDF will build static libraries only. To turn on shared libraries, use the --enable-shared option to the netCDF configure script.

With netCDF version 3.6.2, shared libraries can be built on platforms which support them by using the --enable-shared argument to netCDF configure script. Users of earlier versions of netCDF can build shared libraries by setting flags correctly during builds. When you use a static library, the code is copied from the library into your program when the program is built. The library is only needed at build time.

No, there are still some limits on sizes of netCDF objects, even with the new 64-bit offset format. Each fixed-size variable and the data for one record's worth of a single record variable are limited in size to a little less that 4 GiB, which is twice the size limit in versions earlier than netCDF 3.6.

CDF was developed at the NASA Space Science Data Center at Goddard, and is freely available. It was originally a VMS FORTRAN interface for scientific data access. Unidata reimplemented the library from scratch to use XDR for a machine-independent representation, designed the CDL (network Common Data form Language) text representation for netCDF data, and added aggregate data access, a single-file implementation, named dimensions, and variable-specific attributes.