Data formats

!!! Early draft !!!

netCDF3 vs netCDF4 IDL 8.0 ships with support for netCDF-4, including support for OPeNDAP remote access.

MATLAB 2012a includes netCDF 4 support with OPeNDAP support turned on, enabling remote access to many kinds of data, as well as use of groups, compression, and chunking. An example is available demonstrating some of the new functions. NCTOOLBOX, uses netCDF-Java to provide read access to datasets in netCDF-4, GRIB, GRIB2 and other formats through Unidata’s Common Data Model.

R has the ncdf4 package.

Python has the netcdf4-python package.

ArcGIS 10.0 can read netcdf4 using the Multidimensional Tools in ArcToolbox, and in ArcGIS 10.1, the Multidimensional Supplemental toolbox uses NetCDF4-Python to read OPeNDAP and netCDF4 files, taking advantage of CF conventions if they exist.