NetCDF

Status Report: May 2011 - September 2011

Russ Rew, Ed Hartnett, Dennis Heimbigner

Strategic Focus Areas

The netCDF group's work supports the following Unidata funding proposal focus areas:

  1. Broadening participation and expanding community services
    by providing effective support to a growing netCDF user community, including users of satellite products, GIS, climate, and ocean data.
  2. Advancing data services
    by developing and supporting a key infrastructure element for data providers and users of climate, atmosphere, and ocean data.
  3. Developing and deploying useful tools
    by engineering general-purpose software and utilities supporting the analysis, visualization, and management of model output and observational data.
  4. Enhancing user support services
    by maintaining comprehensive documentation, providing annual workshops, responding to support questions, maintaining example programs and files, and keeping online FAQs, best practices, and the netCDF web site up to date.
  5. Providing leadership in cyberinfrastructure
    by seeking endorsement of standards bodies for netCDF formats and for Climate and Forecast (CF) model metadata conventions based on netCDF.
  6. Promoting diversity by expanding opportunities
    using an open source development process, accepting user contributions, and democratizing access to valuable data archives.

Activities Since the Last Status Report

Use of Jira

The netCDF C-based project is now using Jira for tracking issues, planning releases, and making our development process more transparent to users. With Jira, progress on resolving issues and scheduling enhancements in future releases can be easily tracked by users, who can also add public comments on issues. Between May and October, 2011, we created 92 issues, 48 of which have since been resolved or closed. More about how the Jira tool has helped organize our development efforts is in the Developer's Blog entry "Better Organization of NetCDF Development with Jira" by Ed Hartnett.

Releases

Version 4.1.3 of the C-based netCDF software was released in June, 2011. The most important change in this release was making shared libraries the default instead of static libraries, but it also included documentation improvements and bug fixes. Release Notes are now generated from the Jira issue tracking system.

With the upcoming release 4.2, we have split the C-based netCDF libraries into 3 separate releases, by making the Fortran and C++ releases "stand along" software that requires an installed netCDF C library but is not bundled with it. This has the advantage that the Fortran and C++ libraries can evolve independently from the C software, with their own release schedules. Benefits to users include simpler build and install procedures, not having to build or install unused libraries, and getting more timely releases of libraries for languages in use at the users' sites.


Planned Activities

Ongoing Activities

We will continue the following activities:

  • Respond to C- and Fortran-based netCDF user questions and run netCDF workshops.
  • Incorporate successful features of netCDF-Java into C-based libraries.
  • Improve support for evolving Climate and Forecast (CF) conventions.
  • Improve support for netCDF on Windows platforms.
  • Oversee development of GRIDSPEC in libCF as part of a collaboration with NOAA's Global Interoperability Project, PCMDI, GFDL, and Tech-X, anticipating that this will become part of the CF conventions.
  • Deal with needs of a growing user community for representing observational data, satellite products, and geoinformatics data.
  • Add support for additional security authorization mechanisms as needed.

New Activities

Our netCDF development plans are entered into the Jira issue tracking system, where tasks, issues, and progress may be followed transparently by users and other developers. We now regularly refer users to specific Jira tickets for tracking resolution of bugs or issues in which they have an interest.