Software Tools & Resources

For Data Providers

• Compliance Checker

  • Language: python 3

  • Currently under development: due Spring 2021

For Data Users

• FAAMnetCDFLoader_IGORPro.zip

  • • Language: IGOR

Provided as-is by FAAM Airborne Laboratory for loading netCDF files in WaveMetrics Igor Pro

• • • Download from here

• netcdf_reader_v1.m: 

  • Language: MATLAB

This is a matlab function making use of the native netcdf function should work with R2010b and above.  It extracts all the information in a netcdf file as a matlab structure 

Input: 

fn: full path to file of interest

Output: a structure containing

header: the global attributes

<variable name>: The variables are structures in themselves made up of 

data: the values of the variables

<attribute name>: all the attributes associated with that variable.

Usage:

data = netcdf_reader_v1('D:\uol-fssp100-2_oden_20180804_aerosol-size-distribution_v1.nc')

• • Download from here 

• AMOF_ncSuit_v1.0

AMOF_ncSuit is a GUI (graphical user interface) designed to aid inspection and visualisation of netCDF files produced by NCAS AMOF instrumentation. In principle, any netCDF file can be opened and inspected using this interface but behaviour cannot be guaranteed. This interface allows the user to:

1. Use an open file dialogue box to select the target file

2. Inspect the global attributes, dimensions and variables defined in the file

3. Select a particular variable and inspect these variables attributes and the data associated with it. Note data inspection is limited to m x n matrices.

4. Plot a graph (and save to .png if required) of the selected variable.

5. Extract the selected variable and save to a .xlsx file 

Manual:  Download from here 

• AMOF_ncSuit_v1.exe:

  • • Win10  Standalone App Download from here 

Language: python 3

• • • AMOF_ncSuit_v1.0.py

      • • Uncompiled code for win10: Download from here 

        • Uncompiled code for centos 7: Download from here 

AMOF_ncSuit_v1.0.ipynb

• • • Jupyter Notebook: Download from here 

• AMOF_pytools_v1.0

Python package

• • • • Language: python 3

      • Currently under development: due Dec 2021

• AMOF_cistools_v1.0

Plug-in library for CIS

• • • • Language: python 3

      • Currently under development: due Feb 2022

• There is a wide range of packages available to help you access and display data data provided in netCDF format. An extensive and comprehensive listing of what is available can be found here.

• UCAR have developed a set of software libraries and maintains netCDF programming interfaces for C, C++, Java, and Fortran. Programming interfaces are also available for Python, IDL, MATLAB, R, Ruby, and Perl. Explore and download what is available here.

• The netcdf4 module for python is highly versatile and easily used - the ever growing python community has many resources and plenty of examples.

• Many of the scientific data processing packages, for example Matlab and IDL, have inbuilt netCDF support. For MATLAB there is a generic NetCDF reader which will open and dump the contents of the file into a MATLAB data structure. This tool is shareware ad can be found here.

• For linux users there is ncdump tool. This tool generates an ASCII representation of a netCDF file on standard output, either with or without an ASCII representation of the variable data in the file. ncdump may also be used as a simple browser for netCDF data files, to display the dimension names and sizes; variable names, types, and shapes; attribute names and values; and optionally, the values of data for all variables or selected variables in a netCDF file.

• ncBrowse is a Java application that provides flexible, interactive graphical displays of data and attributes from a wide range of netCDF data file conventions. ncBrowse will run on any UNIX or Windows machine with a Java 2 (JDK1.2) virtual machine installed.

• Panoply is a software environment that can slice and plot geo-referenced latitude-longitude, latitude-vertical, longitude-vertical, time-latitude or time-vertical arrays from larger multidimensional variables. Its not so good for working with timeSeriesPoint data product types.

• CIS (Community Intercomparison Suite) is an open source command-line tool for easy co-location, visualisation, analysis, and comparison of diverse gridded and ungridded datasets used in the atmospheric sciences. The advantage of the NCAS Data standards that are being developed is the ease with which “plug-ins” have been developed for CIS that allows the suit to easily access our data. This project will be developing CIS plug-ins for all its data products.

• netcdf4excel is a Visual Basic add-in for MS Excel. This add-in simplifies the use of NetCDF data in Excel, providing a ready to use solution for manipulating this type of data. The add-in is written in VBA 6.0 (so it won't work with Office 2010 64 bits) and is designed for Excel 2007 running with the Microsoft Windows operating system. It supports opening netCDF classic format data with Excel for read or write access.

• Agricultural and Meteorological Software have developed a simple extraction tool for windows. This is software for the viewing, conversion, and extraction of data from .nc and .nc4 files.

• The Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) also has a range of tools and services including their web processing service WPS. The CEDA Web Processing Service (WPS) provides a set of useful functions (processes) under a simple Web Service. The WPS User Interface (UI) is a web front-end that allows the user to run processes ranging from a simple plot request to a complex model simulation (run on an offline server). The WPS documentation describes the structure of the service, the technologies that have been used to build it and explains what a WPS "process" is. Check out the the contents page or jump straight to the main features of the WPS or WPS processes.