NetCDF-CF: Supporting Earth System Science with Data Access, Analysis, and Visualization

NetCDF-CF is a community-developed convention for storing and describing Earth system science data in the netCDF binary data format. It is an OGC recognized standard with numerous existing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and commercial software tools that can explore, analyze, and visualize data that conform to this convention.

Recent projects and community efforts have developed several extensions to netCDF-CF that have or soon will be proposed to the netCDF-CF community. Work on these extensions involved broad participation by members of the existing netCDF-CF community as well as members of ESS domains not traditionally represented in the netCDF-CF community. Several of the extensions that are furthest along the development / proposal / acceptance process include:

• The Geometries proposal (which has been accepted by CF) allows Hydrologists to represent, e.g., river flow data for a network of river segments as well as precipitation for a collection of drainage basins.
• The Satellite Swath proposal supports satellite remote sensing scientists to represent satellite swath data in the original instrument viewing geometry.
• The CF-Radial proposal supports storing radar and lidar data in polar coordinates and with metadata important to represent data from pulsed, scanning instruments.
• The netCDF-LD proposal enables encoding Linked Data descriptions in netCDF files with explicit bindings to conventions, vocabularies and other online Linked Data resources.
• The Group proposal enables data and metadata to be stored in a way that captures hierarchical directory-like structures.

This presentation will provide an overview and update of this work. It will present some of the data analysis and visualization tools that have been prototyped as well as work to improve performance and usability.