file extension NC

NcBrowse is a generic netCDF file viewer that includes Java graphics, animations and 3D visualizations for a wide range of netCDF file conventions.

Ncview is a visual browser for netCDF format files. Typically you would use Ncview to get a quick and easy, push-button look at your netCDF files. You can view simple movies of the data, view along various dimensions, take a look at the actual data values, change color maps, invert the data.

Panoply is a netCDF file viewer developed at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies which focuses on presentation of geo-gridded data. It is written in Java and thus platform independent. Although its feature set overlaps with ncBrowse and ncview, Panoply is distinguished by offering a wide variety of map projections and ability to work with different scale color tables.

The netCDF Operators, or NCO, are a suite of programs known as operators. Each operator is a standalone, command line program which is executed at the UNIX shell-level like, e.g., ls or mkdir. The operators take netCDF files as input, then perform a set of operations (e.g., deriving new data, averaging, hyperslabbing, or metadata manipulation) and produce a netCDF file as output. The operators are primarily designed to aid manipulation and analysis of gridded scientific data. The single command style of NCO allows users to manipulate and analyze files interactively and with simple scripts, avoiding the overhead (and some of the power) of a higher level programming environment.

NetCDF

is a set of interfaces for array-oriented data access and a freely-distributed collection of data access libraries for C, Fortran, C++, Java, and other languages. The netCDF libraries support a machine-independent format for representing scientific data. Together, the interfaces, libraries, and format support the creation, access, and sharing of scientific data.

NetCDF data is:

• Self-Describing

  A netCDF file includes information about the data it contains.

• Portable

  A netCDF file can be accessed by computers with different ways of storing integers, characters, and floating-point numbers.

• Direct-access

  A small subset of a large dataset may be accessed efficiently, without first reading through all the preceding data.

• Appendable

  Data may be appended to a properly structured netCDF file without copying the dataset or redefining its structure.

• Sharable

  One writer and multiple readers may simultaneously access the same netCDF file.

• Archivable

  Access to all earlier forms of netCDF data will be supported by current and future versions of the software.

The netCDF software was developed by Glenn Davis, Russ Rew, Steve Emmerson, John Caron, Harvey Davies, and Ed Hartnett at the Unidata Program Center in Boulder, Colorado, with contributions from many other netCDF users.