Hi Cathy: I don't know the official UNIDATA position on this, but from my
perspective as developer for the COSMIC data center which uses netCDF
extensively, I would not necessarily migrate everything to netCDF4.
We plan on sticking with netCDF3 for our data center. netCDF3 is a
simple, elegant format that does not require extensive tuning to read and
write. It's readers are easy to compile and maintain.
We have written applications that read netCDF3 binaries directly in order
to speed certain applications for which the UNIDATA readers are
too difficult to modify for our needs.
Just my 2 cents...
Regards,
Doug Hunt
dhunt@xxxxxxxx
Software Engineer
UCAR - COSMIC, Tel. (303) 497-2611
On Thu, 6 Nov 2014, Cathy Smith (NOAA Affiliate) wrote:
NetCDF'ers
We've changed many of our files from netCDF3 to netCDF4 both to take
advantage of internal packing but also because they work better in some
software (NCL). We have heard from users of problems reading the newer
format. Often they don't have their applications or netCDF library upgraded
to the latest versions but sometimes, software they relied on isn't available
for netCDF4. For example, EXCEL does not have a netCDF4 interface and a
package called "FAN" probably doesn't. Should we be assuming users and
software developers ought to be netCDF4 ready or is netCDF4 more of a
language for advanced users and there is no expectation that users use it as
opposed to netCDF3? Should unidata be facilitating the update of packages to
netCDF4? I'm thinking more of local software such as on this page
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/Contrib.html but also packages
like EXCEL.
We do suggest users can convert the files back to netCDF3 if possible but
there are downsides to that for the users.
Thanks,
Cathy Smith
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