>From Roy_Mendelssohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Mon Jul 17 03:55:17 1995
>Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 08:55:17 EST
>From: "Roy Mendelssohn" <Roy_Mendelssohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>To: netcdfgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I know the following two points have been discussed before, but I don't
remember
a satisfactory answer and was wondering if anyone had made some progress on
these fronts. I am posting this to HDF also, as I am facing similar problems
there and would appreciate any possible solutions for HDF files also.
1). Some datasets I would like to put into NetCDF/HDF contain multiple
observations at a given lat, lon,time, depth dimension. The question is how to
put these into the format. One solution suggested is to have the observations
as the unlimited dimension. This has several drawbacks. The first is that the
dataset can not be expanded along the time axis as more observations are
obtained. The second is that the size of the array ends up being dimensioned
by
the location with the most number of observations. This makes the array much
bigger than it needs to be, often astoundingly so (for example, if there is
buoy
data there are a lot of observations, and those locations will set the
dimensioning for the entire array.
2) Is there any way to create an array of structures, so that at each
lat,lon,depth,time instead of pointing to a number, I point to a structure?
This would be helpful when you want to put packed binary records of a fixed
length into NetCDF. The length wouldn't be limited by the length of a word on
the machine (such as if I wanted to have a CMR5 record as the "observation" at
a
particular location.
Any help or ideas would be most appreciated.
Roy Mendelssohn
Pacific Fisheries Environmental Group
1352 Lighthouse Avenue
Pacific Grove, CA 93950-2097
408-648-9029 (voice and fax)
Roy_Mendelssohn@xxxxxxxxxxxx
