[no subject]

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
______________________________________________________________________________