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NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) is a set of software libraries and self-describing, machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data. NetCDF is commonly used to store and distribute scientific data. The NetCDF software was developed at the Unidata Program Center in Boulder, Colorado, USA (Unidata NetCDF Factsheet; Also see Wikipedia article). NetCDF files usually have the extension .nc. NetCDF file can be read by many software applications, for example Matlab, IDL, and ArcGIS.

There also are (non-mandatory) conventions on metadata for climate and forecast data stored in NetCDF format (CF Convention). NetCDF files which are CF compliant can be interpreted by a range of software tools to read, process and visualise the data (e.g. Metview, NCView, Xconv).

The latest version of the NetCDF format is NetCDF 4 (aka NetCDF enhanced, introduced in 2008), but NetCDF 3 (NetCDF classic) is also still widely used.

To decode NetCDF files there is an official NetCDF Application Programming Interface (API) with interfaces in Fortran, C, C++, and Java available from Unidata. The API also comes with some useful command-line tools (e.g. ncdump -h file.nc gives a nice summary of file contents - see ncdump guide).

There are ways to convert a NetCDF file to ASCII or text (e.g. netcdf4excel).

For writing NetCDF files, please check through Unidata 6 Best Practices (6.8 Packed Data Values and 6.9 Missing Data Values are of particular interest).

Scale_factor and Add_offset

The Scale_factor and Add_offset attributes in NetCDF files are a mechanism to reduce the storage space needed for NetCDF files, so essentially a data packing mechanism.

When reading and writing NetCDF files software applications compliant with Unidata specifications should deal with Scale_factor and Add_offset automatically, making unpacking (read) and packing (write) completely transparent to the user. This means the user always sees the unpacked data values and doesn't have to deal with Scale_factor and Add_offset. The software application might display the values of Scale_factor and Add_offset for reference, similar to a ZIP compression software displaying the compression factor.
For example in Matlab (ncread, ncwrite) and the Unidata NetCDF4 library for Python  work like this.

The above is how application software should be implemented, i.e. to show unpacked data values. Some software applications might be implemented differently and display the packed data values. In this case the user has to calculate the unpacked values using Scale_factor and Add_offset, using these formulae:

  • unpacked_data_value = packed_data_value * scale_factor + add_offset
  • packed_data_value = nint((unpacked_data_value - add_offset) / scale_factor)

In any case we recommend you check your processing software's documentation on how it deals with Scale_factor and Add_offset.

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