[Gdal-dev] RE: GDAL netcdf convention CF support

[Frank Warmerdam]

On 8/18/05, Norman Barker <nbarker at rsinc.com> wrote:
> [Norman Barker]  
>   
> Hi, 
>   
> this is a really exciting announcement.  I have run ncdump on my netcdf file
> and checked the variables, and gdalinfo picks up the lat, lon, and ozone
> vars ok.  It puts the z-levels in bands within the data file which is ok
> since that was the way that we had done it with geotiff.  It has lost the
> information attaching the band level to an atmospheric height.  Even if this
> was a comma separated index string it would be useful.    It has also lost
> the Time dimension stamp within the file.  Again is this could just be a
> metadata tag that would be great. 

Norman / Denis,

I agree that attaching the dimension value(s) unrolled as bands as
band metatadata would be desirable.  
 
> I would like to help wrap this into MapServer WCS if possible, if I am
> missing something with my comments above please let me know.  This is great
> though, is has caused great excitement in our office! 

Are you interested in having GDAL write netCDF files so that 
MapServer can return netCDF files?   As far as I know, there is no
support for creation/writing in the generic netcdf module in GDAL but
it seems like it might not be that hard to implement.  

Denis, please feel free to proceed with this as you have time.

I would like to stress to everyone that Denis will not have any 
significant time to work on GDAL after the end of August, so if
you want to try out netcdf (or HDF5) support, now is the time to 
do it, and get him feedback in time to make fixes.

Best regards,
-- 
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