I have been using the ARC/INFO geographic information system from ESRI
for many years and am aware of countless spatial data sets that are
available or produced in this system. Ironically the GIS users tend not
to be the visualizers in the climate, weather, and other modeling
fields. Consequently, it looks like there is no ready conversion from
an ARC/INFO data set into the widely-used netCDF format.
Are you aware of any converters to take ARC/INFO data to or from netCDF
as 2-D line graphics or as single-layer gridded "image" data (both data
types are supported in the GIS), or would a filter need to be written?
ARC/INFO has the ability to create formatted ASCII files of the points
lines and polygons, and can dump ASCII forms of raster data, too. An
example of line data in ASCII form from the "generate" format of
ARC/INFO would be:
ID
x,y
x,y
x,y
x,y
END
ID
x,y
...
...
END
END
where ID represents some integer value (key) to a quantity being mapped,
and the chain of coordinates is terminated by the END statement, as is
the file. Polygons are represented in a similar way.
This would be a nice utility to provide cartographic "background"
information for modelers by harvesting existing ARC/INFO data, or to
take geo data from models and use them within the cartographic and
analytic setting of ARC/INFO.
Thanks.
Doug Nebert
USGS
