Julie, Sorry for the delayed response, I didn't realize this ticket was handed over to me. It sounds like you want low level access to the values in the Grib message data section. The netcdf package uses the Java Grib library to do the low level extraction of the data. There are routines Grib1GetData and Grib2GetData that uses parameters from an index(gbx file) to extract the data on a variable basis. The package is located at: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/decoders/ There are also Java docs on the page. You should look at the Indexer routines and the index tag on the page. One note, this package is being refactored so the index API is going to change from a text type index to a binary index for performance reasons. The package will be backward compatible but the binary index are more complete especially for the ensemble type data. I included an support message that might help too. http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/mailing_lists/archives/decoders/2008/msg00024.html Robb... Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: HSK-843499 Department: Support netCDF Java Priority: Critical Status: Open