The Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Application (NCSA) at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been used by many atmospheric sciences applications since it is first released in 1988. Since 1999, NCSA has developed a more general and robust data format, called HDF5, which was aimed to support the future demands of Earth Science such as large data storage, performance and flexibility. In this poster, we will demonstrate how HDF5 can provide the flexibility and efficiency in six well-known atmospheric science and climate applications.

These six applications include Earth Observing System (EOS) in NASA Earth Sciences Enterprise; National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) and NPOESS Preparatory Program (NPP); Weather Research Forecasting Model (WRF) developed at NCAR and are adopted by NCEP, OpeNDAP/DODS software framework that has been extensively used in climate and atmospheric science community, NCAR Unidata Net Comm Data Format (NetCDF) that is almost universally accepted in climate and atmospheric science community and HL-HDF software package that is used to store weather radar data.

For more information:

HDF Home Page: http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu HDF Help Desk: hdfhelp@ncsa.uiuc.edu