NetCDF operators (NCO) version 4.2.2

Version 4.2.2 of the netCDF Operators (NCO) has been released. NCO is an Open Source package that consists of a dozen standalone, command-line programs that take netCDF files as input, then operate (e.g., derive new data, average, print, hyperslab, manipulate metadata) and output the results to screen or files in text, binary, or netCDF formats.

The NCO project is coordinated by Professor Charlie Zender of the Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine. More information about the project, along with binary and source downloads, are available on the SourceForge project page.

From the release message:

This release finishes some older work and introduces new functionality supported by our NASA ACCESS grant. Old stuff first: Optional specification of header pads in all operators and of negative hyperslab indices (to count backwards from the end) are now supported on all operators for which they make sense. And ncwa is now present in the Windows tarball.

This release improves netCDF4/HDF5 support in ncks and ncecat. ncks now supports printing and subsetting group hierarchies. Similarly, ncecat now aggregates files into group hierarchies. They will work as is on most netCDF4 files. They do not yet support user-defined and compound types, which are still rarely seen.

Let us know how you like or dislike the way we have implemented the equivalent functionality for netCDF4 that NCO already had for netCDF3. Your feedback will help us finalize details like the printed output format for group information and the syntax of switches. This improved netCDF4 support will eventually come to all of NCO.