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Currently the interactive CDS forms don't allow users to select NetCDF as data format for their retrievals. However, the value of the format keyword in CDS API scripts can be set to "netcdf" to obtain a netCDF version of the archived GRIB data.
Users must be aware of the following:
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that conversion to NetCDF is considered experimental and it is not guaranteed to work in all situations.
In this context,
- It is NOT recommended to download hindcast data in netCDF, if include in a single request more than one model version (system) is requested. Note that for hindcasts, data from more than one system may exist in the archive and that, if system is not explicitly specified it defaults to in the request, the default is to return all available systems.
- It is NOT recommended to use when downloading include in a single request data related to more than one start time in a single request.
Efficiency tips
The C3S seasonal forecast dataset is currently based on GRIB files archived at ECMWF's MARS archive. This implies, in some situations, accessing data not available online (on disk) but archived in the tape library.
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