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Hi Holger, > Steve Williams told me to contact you for netcdf questions. I have > never dealt with this file format and the documentation I found online > so far, was nearly incomprehensible - as manuals usually are. > Do you have some sort of 'beginners' documentation, that easily explain's > in an simple way how to handle this format in IDL, which I'll be using? Sorry, but the netCDF User's Guide is intended to be both a beginner's guide and a reference manual. It is intended for C and Fortran programmers rather than people who use netCDF data through other packages such as IDL. IDL provides some documentation of their netCDF access functions, but I don't know if they provide any examples. As an example, here is how to read data from a netCDF variable named GP in a file named "data/aprin.nc" into an IDL variable named gp using the IDL language: id = ncdf_open('data/april.nc') ncdf_varget,id, ncdf_varid( id, 'GP'), gp Now you can visualize the data in the gp variable in a large variety of ways and use it in other computations in IDL. Their are also a couple of versions of browsing packages for netCDF data that are written using the IDL language. For example, see the following file available via anonymous FTP: ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/contrib/ncbrowse.pro > Unfortunately all the CEPEX data, which I need to look at, are in this > format and so I will have to deal with it and would really appreciate > your help. I hope you got anything printed out, which I would ask you > to put into the interoffice mail to Holger Voemel, NOAA/CMDL/RE/CG1. I've sent a copy of the NetCDF User's Guide and a copy of a paper that presents an overview of netCDF. ______________________________________________________________________________ Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program address@hidden P.O. Box 3000 http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/ Boulder, CO 80307-3000 ______________________________________________________________________________