netCDF  4.3.0
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Is NetCDF a Good Archive Format?

NetCDF classic or 64-bit offset formats can be used as a general-purpose archive format for storing arrays.

Compression of data is possible with netCDF (e.g., using arrays of eight-bit or 16-bit integers to encode low-resolution floating-point numbers instead of arrays of 32-bit numbers), or the resulting data file may be compressed before storage (but must be uncompressed before it is read). Hence, using these netCDF formats may require more space than special-purpose archive formats that exploit knowledge of particular characteristics of specific datasets.

With netCDF-4/HDF5 format, the zlib library can provide compression on a per-variable basis. That is, some variables may be compressed, others not. In this case the compression and decompression of data happen transparently to the user, and the data may be stored, read, and written compressed.


Generated on Tue Jul 9 2013 19:18:06 for netCDF. NetCDF is a Unidata library.