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Hi Dave, > I hope you are doing well! Yes, thanks, I'm about to return to Boulder from the week long AGU meeting, where I gave a talk on recent netCDF advances for for data interoperability. > I usually contact TomY about these issues, but I see your name attached > to this page: > http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/Contrib.html > > Ideally, what I'm looking for is a way to convert McIDAS MD files to > netCDF. If you aren't aware of that, next would be text->netCDF. I see > tbl2cdf and text2nc on your page, but they're from the 1990s. Are they > still being used? I don't know of an existing program to convert McIDAS MD to netCDF. I also don't know how much use tbl2cdf or text2nc are getting, but we still support the netCDF version 2 APIs in terms of which they were written, even in the most recent netCDF-4.1.1 release. So if they look useful, you should be able to compile and link them with the most recent library. > What complicates this in my mind is the data are upper-air reports, so > for each station there could be up to 50 pressure levels. I'm not sure > if these text->nc converters are going to work, anyway. > > Any thoughts or suggestions? One route to a solution would be to use CDL, a text form for representing netCDF data, as an intermediate form. Roughly, if you can convert the McIDAS MD data to text form and then use text tools like sed, awk, or perl to make that text form look like CDL, then you can use the ncgen utility that comes with netCDF to convert the CDL to binary netCDF form. This also might be helpful for generating a program to do what you want. The ncgen utility, in addition to converting CDL to netCDF, can also generate a C program that will create the same netCDF data. So that could generate a lo of the boilerplate code you would need for a conversion program. Another intermediate text form that can be used in the same way is NcML, which the Java equivalent of ncdump and ncgen can use in the same way, though I don't think you can generate Java code from NcML. I hope that helps. Gotta go catch a plane now ... --Russ Russ Rew UCAR Unidata Program address@hidden http://www.unidata.ucar.edu Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: CCW-349155 Department: Support netCDF Priority: Normal Status: Closed