[gdal-dev] Re: GDAL with netCDF4 support

[Michael Sumner]

Chris wrote:

>> By the way,
>>GDAL/netcdf-4 seems to be my only was of being able to access OpenDAP data
>>from inside R.

>Which is why you should use Python (and Rpy) ;-)


I didn't know Python was widely used for OpenDAP - is that via GDAL or
native?  Can you point to examples of its use and set up?

Native use of NetCDF and OpenDAP still requires a lot of work to
manage data structures in Matlab and so on - "georeferenced nD arrays"
just don't seem to be supported across the board. Is this improved in
the Python support?

GDAL's OpenDAP (and NetCDF) is incredibly useful, but it  takes  work
to reconstruct the multidimensional structure of the original dataset
- for NetCDF I find it easier to use the native libraries, even with
the overhead of managing the metadata manually.

Building GDAL with OpenDAP binaries on Windows is not difficult, I
don't know about 64-bit OpenDAP though:

http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2008-October/018482.html

Building rgdal for Windows is more involved, and no one has done this
for 64-bit AFAIK.


Cheers, Mike.