WCS NetCDF Development

From Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)

Back to WCS_Access_to_netCDF_Files


Web Coverage Service Access from NetCDF Files.

The goal is to provide you an easy way to publish your data in NetCDF format.

The cross-platform toolkit from data to Web Service contains:

  • Checking the CF compatibility of your data.
  • Creating CF compatible NetCDF files from your data.
  • Setting up a Web Coverage Service directly from your files with no extra configuration.

Below are sections and descriptions to all the tools we provide. Feel free to participate!

Cross Platform Python-NetCDF Library

The most feature-rich library to access NetCDF files via python is PyNIO. Unfortunately it is unix-only. That's why nc3 was created. The two purposes of nc3 are:

  • Provide simple read and write access to NetCDF files.
  • WCS query: Extract a subcube from a NetCDF.

This is supposed to be a small library. The subcube query is supposed to be fast, everything else is supposed to be simple. If you do a lot of data processing using NetCDF or python, we recommend PyNIO.

NetCDF Markup Language: NCML

Creating a NetCDF file via plain API is difficult, NCML allows you to describe dimensions, variables and attributes in one xml document. This simplifies creating an empty NetCDF file a great deal.

Example NCML use:

CMAQ_Baron_20.ncml

CF-1.x Convention

It's not enough to have NetCDF as format, you also need to standardize the attribute names, how to store dimensions etc. To make it easy to create CF-1.x compatible files, we provide a python library cf1.

The main page for CF-1.4 documentation: http://cf-pcmdi.llnl.gov/

(enter our sample project here)


Getting The Source for Windows

We're using DARCS, a Distributed Version Control System.

Download it from here for Windows 2.2.1 and Other Operating Systems.

If you are a Windows user we recommend integrated GUI TortoiseDarcs.

Once you have darcs installed, issue command:

darcs get http://webapps.datafed.net/nest/OWS

This will create directory OWS into your current folder. For windows, we recommend C:\. You need to have write rights in your current folder for temporary files.

Now you are free to edit any file.

  • OWS stands for OpenGeoSpatial Web Services. Most popular is WMS, Web Map Service. This project may later include other web services besides WCS as well.

Wrapper code for netCDF-CF WCS

K. Hoijarvi (WUSTL) and M. Decker (FZ Juelich), Co-developers
Used DARCS, a Distributed Version Control System
The wrapper code is portable between Windows and Linux OS
Code repositories at Datafed and Juelich

Live WCS Servers that use the wrapper Code:

Existing Features of WCS

  • describe kinds of dimensions
  • kinds of lat/lon filters
  • kinds of time filters
  • ISO time format


Update Log

2009-07-21: Finished runtime testing and recommended total update. Also updated Creating NetCDF CF Files.

2009-07-15: Updated the Windows runtime and installation instructions.

2009-07-08: Started this page.

2009-07-02: First External darcs repository for OWS at Juelich.

2009-06-04: After being used for some datasets at Datafed, we get the first external developer, M. Decker, to contribute to the source code. He adds non-ascii character support.

2007-11-21: First Real Dataset online.

2007-11-12: First Linux port.

2007-10-22: Development starts for Windows.

Web Resource Pages Tagged netCDF



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