Re: 950210: NetCDF

> Organization: MIT Plasma Fusion Center
> Keywords: 199502091729.AA26456

Hi Martin,

> I work in the Magnetic Fusion program at MIT.  We have a possible
> application for NetCDF - interchange of data between various labs in this
> country and abroad.  This has been an ongoing effort but uses fairly
> primitive software technology.  My understanding is that NetCDF is
> designed to ease transfer of data between different platforms and
> systems. NetCDF is referred to as a "self-describing data format" which
> sounds like what we are looking for.
> 
> Is introductory documentation available?

Yes.  You might want to first look at the NetCDF Home Page for the World
Wide Web that we maintain at

    http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/
   
using some WWW browser such as Netscape or Mosaic.  It contains links to
other on-line netCDF documents.  In case you don't have access to WWW
browsers, a netCDF README file is also available via anonymous FTP in the
pub/netcdf/ directory of ftp.unidata.ucar.edu.

> Some questions I have are:
> 
> What are the basic principles of NetCDF?
> What platforms and languages are supported?
> What are the licensing issues?
> How does NetCDF relate to CDF?  
> How does it differ from HDF?

These are good questions that get asked frequently enough that we've
collected the questions and answers into a netCDF Frequently Asked Questions
document, available to WWW browsers from the netCDF home page or via
anonymous FTP from the file pub/netcdf/faq.txt on ftp.unidata.ucar.edu.

If after browsing these documents you still have questions about netCDF,
please send them to address@hidden.

______________________________________________________________________________

Russ Rew                                                UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                                          P.O. Box 3000
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/                          Boulder, CO 80307-3000
______________________________________________________________________________