Unidata NetCDF
About
The Unidata network Common Data Form (netCDF) is an interface for
scientific data access and a freely-distributed software library that
provides an implementation of the interface. The netCDF library also
defines a machine-independent format for representing scientific data.
Together, the interface, library, and format support the creation,
access, and sharing of scientific data. The current netCDF software
provides C interfaces for applications and data. Separate software
distributions available from Unidata provide Java, Fortran, Python,
and C++ interfaces. They have been tested on various common
platforms.
Properties
NetCDF files are self-describing, network-transparent, directly
accessible, and extendible. Self-describing means that a netCDF file
includes information about the data it contains. Network-transparent
means that a netCDF file is represented in a form that can be accessed
by computers with different ways of storing integers, characters, and
floating-point numbers. Direct-access means that a small subset of a
large dataset may be accessed efficiently, without first reading through
all the preceding data. Extendible means that data can be appended to
a netCDF dataset without copying it or redefining its structure.
Use
NetCDF is useful for supporting access to diverse kinds of scientific
data in heterogeneous networking environments and for writing
application software that does not depend on application-specific
formats. For information about a variety of analysis and display
packages that have been developed to analyze and display data in
netCDF form, see
More information
For more information about netCDF, see
Latest releases
You can obtain a copy of the latest released version of netCDF
software for various languages:
Copyright
Copyright and licensing information can be found here, as well as in the COPYRIGHT file accompanying the software
Installation
To install the netCDF-C software, please see the file INSTALL in the
netCDF-C distribution, or the (usually more up-to-date) document:
Documentation
A language-independent User's Guide for netCDF, and some other
language-specific user-level documents are available from:
- Language-independent User's Guide
- NetCDF-C Tutorial
- Fortran-90 User's Guide
- Fortran-77 User's Guide
- netCDF-Java/Common Data Model library
- netCDF4-python
A mailing list, netcdfgroup@unidata.ucar.edu, exists for discussion of
the netCDF interface and announcements about netCDF bugs, fixes, and
enhancements. For information about how to subscribe, see the URL
Feedback
We appreciate feedback from users of this package. Please send comments, suggestions, and bug reports to support-netcdf@unidata.ucar.edu.