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Hi Dave, I'm not sure whether Ed answered your question yet, so here's my answers ... > I was looking for the alpha version of NetCDF 4.0 that you described > in your talk at the HDF conference, but the only thing I found in > the download section has a December 2003 date. I assume there is (or > will be soon) something newer. Is it available yet, and if so where > can I find it? An alpha release dated November 3, 2004 is now available from the downloads link: http://gforge.unidata.ucar.edu/project/showfiles.php?group_id=7 > Also I have a question (apologies if I just wasn't paying attention) > that I didn't hear answered in your talk. It seems as if in HDF > terms NetCDF 4.0 is a specification particular layout of an HDF > file, rather like HDF-EOS. My question is what happens if you use > the NetCDF 4.0 interface to read a generic HDF 5.0 file or an > HDF-EOS 5.0 file. Would it make sense of these files? Does it only > understand Vgroups and SDS's? Or would it recognize image data and > Vdata as well? (Sorry if this is incorrect terminology for HDF 5.0 > -- I'm really only familiar with HDF 4.0 as of now). You can't read a generic HDF 5.0 file or an HDF-EOS 5.0 file through the netCDF-4 interface. It's been designed from the beginning to only read datasets that were written through the netCDF-4, netCDF-3, or netCDF-2 interfaces. HDF5 is used as a storage layer to provide enhancements to netCDF, such as large files, parallel I/O, structures, and additional data types, but netCDF-4 is designed to remain a relatively simple interface, which it would never remain if it had to deal with the full generality and complexity of HDF5 files. --Russ